Unavoidably, now, and with ineffable sadness, his own words come back on him. You reap what you sow, and everything right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk sowed in his young life led, perhaps inevitably, to its end.
He lived by the tenet that living by the gun in America was worth a few dead schoolkids here and there, and then he himself died by the gun. The irony is cruel and stark and almost perfect in its symmetry.
It was, in fact, just after answering a college kid's question about mass shootings that a rooftop sniper squeezed off a shot and Kirk's neck began to spew blood. He died not long after -- a martyr to the truth on one side of our national divide, and a soulless bully getting his just desserts on the other.
I won't subscribe to either, because the former is the product of delusion and the latter presumes the personally unknowable. I don't know, in other words, if the demagoguery upon which Kirk built a comfortable life was genuine or simply a profitable business model. All I do know is it exploited that aforementioned divide, feeding on all its fear and loathing and blindness and hate.
Sad way to make your bones, casting the marginalized in our society -- immigrants, the homeless, transgenders and gays, "wokeness" -- as depraved, evil predators responsible for the nation's ills. That was Charlie Kirk's gig, and what a waste of a bright young life. In a tragedy that spreads out and out in concentric circles, that is the seminal one.
And that's what this is, a tragedy. It's the tale of a young man who sent a bloody boomerang out into the world, never imagining he would be its victim. It's the tale of a young man who could have done something affirming with the life God gave him, but chose a different path.
You reap what you sow. And the worst part of all this is what Charlie Kirk sowed continues to bear fruit. Not even his assassination -- a horrific act of political violence that never solves anything and has been the undoing of more than one great empire -- has taught us a damn thing.
Almost immediately, after all, the MAGA crazies took to the Magic Interwhatsis to rail that the Democrats and the media must be made to pay for Kirk's death, that they're all evil creatures who must either be exterminated or brutally suppressed.
And on the other side?
Not a few arch observations wondering where all this right-wing outrage was when a Democratic legislator and her husband were gunned down in Minnesota, and when schoolkids and grocery shoppers and church-goers die at the hands of yet another locked-and-loaded nutjob. A legit question, perhaps, but hardly the time to be asking it.
Meanwhile, on the day after, we again commemorate what fear and loathing and hate wrought on Sept. 11, 2001. And on the Magic Interwhatsis this morning, I ran across a short video that suggested, not for the first time, that the reason WNBA star Caitlyn Clark has been "targeted" (quotation marks mine) is because she's not gay.
Which implies those depraved gays are out to get us, just like Charlie Kirk said.
When will we learn? When?
I think it's worth (it) to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.
- Charlie Kirk
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