I didn’t know of Charlie Kirk until after. I recognized the face, but he wasn’t someone I followed. I recognized his organization, and the “Change My Mind” format of his interviews. A year has passed, and memories are being relived.
With this anniversary, there is also the Lindsay Clancy case, and the undeniable hints of the same lunacy that surrounded Kirk’s death. That is, the murders hardly count as murders in certain minds. In the case of Kirk, he was so hated by some that his death seemed justice, and in the case of those three children, they are so despised, they are almost an afterthought, their deaths merely serving as part of their murderer’s imagined martyrdom.
The connection seems clear, like a recognized color pallet or style in both pictures, but I find trouble putting it into words. The same sort of evil pervades, the excusing of murder, the inversion of sympathy straining credulity to make the belligerent party the realtm victim, and this Boschian background of insane conspiracy theories surrounding the whole thing like a halo.
Both cases leave behind a fear, a real fear, that America, the West, Democracy, all the norms and values and hopes and dreams of our world, are being lost to cupidity. One man’s virtue, that too is an element of the whole, but it takes two people willing to talk for a conversation: as the jurors get their fifteen, their moment to show us their souls, I despair for the polity.
Will God have mercy for the sake of one righteous man, of the man who was murdered? What can one virtuous man do but be a speed bump along the way of killing children?
Tale Told 