Two murderers stalk the minds of the world. A black man; a white kid. Both insane. Both deluded into thinking themselves the victim. Both, as people have started pointing out, getting their victims in the neck. Their victims have captured our hearts. One unknown girl weeping in confusion as she bleeds out in the terrible isolation of a callous crowd. One celebrity reaching out in dialectic love silenced for bringing people together.
In all this storm of emotion, it hit me suddenly, it could have been you. As the years go by, you’ve grown more and more insane, more and more full of hatred for anyone who sees things differently than you. More manipulative, your words growing rote, as though spoken by another’s voice, a dead man’s voice repeating endlessly and unhearingly.
When you cut me from your life, was it not the same aim as that young boy? Silence my faltering voice? Silence Kirk’s powerful elocution? Silence anyone who might challenge, might make you question, might not be part of the collective?
I suppose I’ll die one day. I suppose that’s what happens to me in the grand scheme of my life. I’m always trying to say as lovingly and as clearly as I know how, to speak plain truth, and I’m always losing you. Before you, another. Before her, others. After you, how many more? Have I not been fired—excuse me, firing would grant me the ability to defend myself from an injustice—have I not been laid off because of a conversation? I seek truth, and find only isolation; in the empty place of a friend, I find my last attempt to reach out, to find a connection, torn up unread. I am always dying, it seems.
We are all Iryna Zarutska . We are all Charlie Kirk. We are all confused, attacked without reason. We were all, as best we could, trying to grasp the truth. Bill Whittle says it right, lays out not only how the leftist’s identity as a person is tied up in their politics, but how it’s a downward spiral into infantile bedlam. Except for being white, when I see you, you look just like that black madman, though it has been a long time since I’ve seen you: the way you dress and the way you hold your head now.
I must admit, over these last five years, I’ve grown more extreme myself. I don’t believe in free speech, democracy, or even, really, freedom of religion anymore. How can we be free when there are madmen killing us? When there’s a knife at our throat? When we are shut down, not by arguments, but by bullets? Democracy, equal voices among equals? But what parity exists between sanity and insanity? What conversation can be had between those who want to converse and those who don’t? How can we have freedom of religion with the demonic?
How many of you have I lost? How many have lost you? Your father, I know; we both miss you. Are you one of those celebrating this death, this silencing? Are you one of those who will continue to look away from Iryna? You have said, in your new, equivocating manner, something like, “For my own mental health, I need to distance myself from you.” I can only translate that into clear English as, “You’re dead to me.”
I have given my negative credo, renounced all the liberal values we grew up with. I’m not even protestant anymore. Let me hold up what I still believe. I believe in life from the dead, and a judgement hereafter, and I hope for you, for all of you. None of you are dead to me. I have hope, one day still, that I will see you all again.
Until then, until this tale is all told, I’m still standing, waiting for your knife or your bullet, praying to God for us all.
God grant me that I can speak the truth like Charlie; that I will be innocent as that girl was. God grant me to live for you, and when I die, to die well.
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