Dear Friends,
I share below an
excellent article by columnist Peggy Noonan on the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
I believe it provides an excellent perspective on our current political divide.
During recent national traumas we’ve
heard the side argument over “thoughts and prayers.” Something terrible
happens, someone sends thoughts and prayers, someone else snaps, “We don’t need
your prayers, we need action.” They denounce the phrase only because they don’t
understand it and give unwitting offense. (I always hope it is
unwitting.)
Prayer is action. It’s effort. It takes time.
Christians believe God is an actual participant in history. He’s here, every
day, in the trenches. He didn’t create the universe and disappear into the mist;
his creation is an ongoing event; he is here in the world with you. When
something terrible happens and you talk to him—that’s what prayer is, talking
to him, communicating with concentration—you are actively asking for help, for
intercession. “Please help her suffering, help their children, they are so
alone.” “Help me be brave through this.”
It’s active, not passive. Catholics, when they’d pray
over and over or with friends, used to call it storming heaven. It isn’t a way
of dodging responsibility, it is (if you are really doing it and not just
publicly posing) a way of taking it.
So, pray now for America. We are in big trouble.
We all know this. We don’t even know what to do with
what we know. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk feels different
as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is going to reverberate in
new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous
sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad. Michael
Smerconish said on CNN Thursday afternoon that normally after such an
event the temperature goes down a little, but not in this case, and he’s right.
There are the heartbroken and the indifferent and they are irreconcilable. X,
formerly Twitter, was from the moment of the shooting overrun with anguish and
rage: It’s on now.
Bluesky, where supposedly gentler folk fled Elon Musk,
was gleefully violent: Too
bad, live by the gun, die by the gun.
But what a disaster all this is for the young. Kirk was
a presence in the life of a whole generation of young conservatives, and he set
a kind of template for how to discuss politics—with good cheer and confidence,
with sincerity and a marshaling of facts. He was literally willing to meet
people where they are. Mainstream media has understandably presented him as a
political person, but he was almost as much an evangelical one, a Christian
unembarrassed to talk about his faith’s importance to him. All the young who
followed him saw the horrifying video of the moment the bullet hit him. They
will remember it all their lives, it will be part of their understanding of
politics in America. They will ask: If you are killed for speaking the truth as
you see it, are you really free? Is this a free country?
For young conservatives who have felt cowed or disdained
on campus, Kirk’s message was no, don’t be afraid, stand and argue your
position. That he was killed literally while doing that—I am not sure we
understand the generational trauma there.
The political violence of the 21st century is all
they’ve ever known—the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011, of
Rep. Steve Scalise in 2017, riots on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021,
the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022, the
attack on Paul Pelosi the same year.
We like to say that something happened gradually and
then suddenly. It’s from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”: A
character, asked how he went bankrupt, says, “Two ways, gradually and then
suddenly.” That’s how political violence in America has been growing in this
century. I would say the 2024 assassination attempts on Donald
Trump, and now the assassination of Kirk, are the “suddenly”
moments. The reality continues while the dark tempo is picking up.
We know this can’t continue and we don’t know how to
stop it. That is our predicament.
For those of us who remember the 1960s and the killing
of Medgar Evers, both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, it feels like
we’re going through another terrible round of political violence. It’s tempting
to think, “That was terrible, but we got through it.” But the assassinations of
the 1960s took place in a healthier country, one that respected itself more and
was, for all its troubles, more at ease with itself. It had give. Part of why
this moment is scary is that we are brittler, and we love each other less,
maybe even love ourselves less. We have less respect for our own history, our
story, and so that can’t act as the adhesive it once was. The assassinations of
the 1960s felt anomalous, unlike us. Now political violence feels like
something we do, which is a painful thought.
What to do? Every suggestion—“lower the temperature,”
“don’t be so quick to judge”—seems necessary but insufficient, and may not be
doable. There are 330 million of us. It’s hard to hold us together when times
are easy.
It has occurred to me that when a country stops making
things like cars and toasters it turns its attention to making words,
endlessly, sometimes brilliantly and constructively, often idiotically and
offensively. People on social media think the words have to be sharp and
dramatic. It sure would be nice to see us throttle back on the expressions and
throttle forward on the reflection, at least for a while.
In the short term, increase security on everyone in our
political life and maybe public life. Spend the money, public and private.
Violence multiplies, it wants to increase, it imitates itself. Each incident
excites the unstable. When it starts to speed up the first thing you have to do
is slow it down.
We have to force our public officials—including
judges—to get serious about confining the mentally ill.
The night before Kirk’s murder a friend sent a note
about where we are as a country. His subject was how people in and around
politics now will do anything for money—they even write tweets for money. He
said that he kept thinking about the Benicio del Toro character, a
prosecutor turned assassin, in the 2015 movie “Sicario.” “This is the land of
wolves now,” he says. I can’t get it out of my head.
We’re going to have to be strong, not lose our heads,
and not give in to demoralization. William F. Buckley used to say,
“Despair is a mortal sin.” You wouldn’t feel it if you had faith that God is
living through history with you. Hold your hope and faith high and intact, keep
your perspective in the long term.
An assassination is the intentional and deliberate
killing of a person for political reasons. It has a purpose: to alter events,
to remove a leader, to intimidate and punish enemies.
