Too much might have already been said about the death of Charlie Kirk. As soon as the news broke, my pen felt hot with the opportunity to lay out my opinions on the page and publish it all to the world. I wanted to rant about gun violence, and political unrest, and all of the other topics that have been trampled by the masses in discussion of this paradigm-shifting moment. Eventually, the fervor I had started this article with died out as more and more people came out of the woodwork to voice their opinions, and I decided I had nothing meaningful to say at all. Then I saw a deer carcass on my drive to school.
The all-encompassing fact of life is that we die, and the process isn’t pretty. We are not destined to be carved in marble, we are destined to rot. We are destined for our eyes to evaporate and our skin to flake away. We are destined for vines to wrap around our arms and legs, and pull us down next to every other corpse that once breathed life. Nothing in this life is certain, but every aspect of death is promised. Whether you like it or not, you will stink, and squelch, and decay.
I was driving through the roundabout I take every day to get in and out of my neighborhood, a task ground down to dust in my mind through monotony. I glided across the asphalt in the line of traffic, and turned my music up, relatively unfocused on the task at hand, when the dead deer, impossibly still, took me out of my restless daydream. Its head had been bloodlessly flattened by a wheel, most likely after it had already died. It was alive once, but not anymore.
I am not a person that is often scared of death. Sure, my human instinct naturally causes fear to well up in my heart when I imagine pain, and all the painful parts of death, but the simple idea of dying isn’t one that bothers me all that much. I try to believe that no matter what happens in the grand cosmic scheme, death will hardly be the end. Ironically, the existence of death is what gives all life meaning. If we were immortal beings, and we stood far away from the great mystery of our existence, then our countless days would soon become impossibly dull. We could simply live out all of our embarrassments, we would forget the price of love. Would we remain human?
There was something wrong with the deer carcass. Maybe it was that it had been laid out to marinate overnight, and its matted fur and drooping tongue were beginning to show signs of that fact. Maybe it was the flat skull that removed all semblance of life; it was clearly dead, and there was nothing any of us could do about it. Maybe it was the nature of a doe, a graceful, harmless creature, impossible of deserving the death it had received. Maybe it was that I had to move, that I couldn’t stay with this moment for a while longer. The world would not wait for me, no matter how hard I stared. I thought about many people when I saw that deer, and Charlie Kirk was not one of them.
I hate to do this, but I feel it is necessary to get to the point. I want to talk about my experience with religion. As a child, I was introduced to Christianity before I could speak. From a young age, I began praying every night before I went to sleep and before I ate a meal, and I have continued to do so till this day. Christianity has centered me in many ways, and for that I am extremely grateful. However, my definition of what it means to “follow Christ” has changed incredibly. To put it simply, I do not give much light to the Old Testament, and any of the bigoted nonsense that holds its place within a book made thousands and thousands of years ago, its true meaning being watered down with every appropriative “translation.” I subscribe to the broader concepts: that sin is real, and that we all must do our best to avoid it. However, I have a distinction. A sin can never be selfless. All sin, in my mind, is an inherently selfish act, and all acts of selfishness are sin. This is backed by the teachings of Jesus Christ, a pretty significant figure in Christianity, if you would believe it. We are asked, first and foremost, to “love thy neighbor,” a call to action to help those who cannot help themselves, and to use love as the greatest of strengths. We are told that any so-called Christian that uses their religion to enforce superiority on others will not be allowed into heaven. We are told to turn the other cheek, to cast aside our anger and to love everyone, and help as many as we can. To me, that constitutes a sort of purpose in life: to radiate compassion, to never let our hatred compel us over our love.
Instead of Kirk, I thought about the swathes of men, women, and children that suffer daily as a cause of selfish and hateful rhetoric. I thought of the genocide of Palestinians that Kirk promoted, and the deaths to domestic gun violence that he neglected until the problem came rapping at his door. I thought of the tens of thousands of immigrants being carted off to torturous detention centers, and all of the helpless individuals around the world, synchronized in their pains at the hands of an American empire, at the hands of men like Kirk.
However, there is no reality in which one can celebrate Kirk’s death and not be morally repugnant. Even as a man who despised Kirk and his beliefs, I have to recognize that every act of political violence in this country only serves to bond the people of the far right to their ideologies, and this act will cause disastrous effects on people undeserving of the pummeling they will soon endure. Already, a mix of personal and global suffering has reared its head: children lost their father, and the oppressed have already begun being hounded. Trans people, despite a shoelace thin attachment to Kirk’s killer, have already been labelled dangerous extremists, and liberalism is being staged like a disease. One thing is for certain: the callous, angered ones in charge will take their vengeance on the innocent tenfold. I have little faith in this country’s ability to avoid bloodshed, and this assasination whittles our chances to avoid conflict down even closer to zero.
Was there ever any hope though? Did we ever have a chance to avoid the boiling point that now is so inevitable? From the inception of nationalistic slag pouring from the mouths of the serpents in charge, was there ever a safer solution than fascism, or a full fledged revolution? Once we made up our minds, and ignored the monsters we feared, what other solution would there be?
When I saw the deer on the side of the road, I realized that we all better get used to seeing bodies. Almost everyone I have talked to saw Kirk’s neck open with their own eyes. We have entered an age where nothing is sacred, and death is the new currency to stimulate the attention economy. When shots ring out again, and another death finds its way on our timelines, will it feel the same? Or does Kirk’s death mean something else? Did we only feel that strong tug of empathy because he was famous? I’m afraid so. If we are all shockingly aware of starvation, violence, disease, subjugation, bigotry and genocide constantly, why do we only care when Kirk dies? What stops us from caring when, at the time of writing, fourteen other innocent people were killed by Israeli missiles mere hours ago? You will never hear their names, you will never be made to care about them, and you will certainly never have your government doing everything in its power to “defend their memory.” In fact, your government is actively erasing them.
Death, to me, is not something to be in fear of. Fear, in a way, is only another form of denial. We should never fear discussing death. It is not a taboo, and we no longer have the privilege to avoid it. However, we must always fear violence and the pain inflicted on one that harms another that doesn’t stop until we all suffer. There are times in which I want to eclipse all aspects of serenity, to douse every blooming flower in gasoline to spite a world so full of indifference. Such anger is natural, but it must be channeled into righteous anger that breathes life into the world, not severs it from beauty. We must give what we have to those who are without. We must forgive those who would never in a million years forgive us. We must defend the ones we love, but never start by killing the ones we hate. If we are all destined to die, then I will continue to pray, for every night of my life, that we all begin to live.
