Time once again to deplore violence and offer up prayers (unless you’re in the House of Representatives, perhaps) and advocate for new gun laws and otherwise trot out the usual responses to a very public murder. It’s easier than owning up to reality.
Wednesday’s assassination of Charlie Kirk is startling for two reasons: He was young (31) and his work was the antithesis of violence. Kirk advocated for and led open discussion of ideas and issues on college campuses, institutions that theoretically exist for exactly that purpose. Learning through thinking, it’s called.
But these are intolerant times. On or off campus, to be confronted with an opposing view or to otherwise have one’s opinion challenged is deemed to be hateful, maybe even racist. Holding an alternate opinion is OK—so far, at least, we aren’t policing thoughts—but openly expressing such an opinion is unconscionable.
When one persists, as did Kirk, one is apt to be denigrated and ostracized and, dare I say it, targeted. Of course, if a bullet actually flies toward a person thus singled out, the violence is, of course, his or her own fault. Sometimes you can have it both ways, apparently.
Terrible times we’re in. It reminds me of a passage in a book published almost exactly 80 years ago, a satire about a society that successfully rebelled against a public system of order and established its own. The book was George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Orwell’s fictional animal revolution devolved into terror, as this passage relates: “They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”
Can’t happen here in America, right? We as a culture are not so intemperate as to subordinate contrary thinkers, to relentlessly and crudely call for their silencing and their expulsion from polite society—we wouldn’t do that, would we? We wouldn’t condone outlandish and fiery rhetoric, would we, hot words that kindle violent impulses in troubled souls, who then act out and give us the opportunity to react in dismay and to deplore it all?
The reality is that Western society is reaching a point where it doesn’t know what to think. It’s giving up its verities—like free speech, “family values” and personal responsibility—and embracing censorship, nihilism and subsidized living. The old USA never was perfect, but the willful erosion of its culture and character is speedily reducing it to an Orwellian state where all opinions are equal but some are more equal than others.
If you still have a semblance of conscience, if you still have the courage to call out absurdity and reject nonsense, now is the moment to yell into your echo chamber, “Hey! Let’s quit dissing everybody who disagrees with us! Let’s hear ‘em out. If our ideas are superior, we’ll prevail. If not, live and learn.”
Live and learn—now there’s an old-fashioned idea. Almost as sound a principle as live and let live.