I still feel quite sad and down today.
I have seen many thoughts on where we are as a country and how the assassination of Charlie Kirk yesterday makes our state of things even more precarious.
I do not wish to participate in a doomsday sort of reflection, but I can’t help but think that we are crossing, or probably have crossed, some significant illiberal threshold. It would seem to me that getting on the other side of this kind of step change will take a long time, a lot of work, and, unfortunately, more death and dehumanization.
I hope I am wrong. Truly.
But, I think illiberalism is a disease that will take much longer to recover from than our other great struggles: Middle East wars, COVID, and the Great Recession. Those being the most experienced for me in my life time.
I worry so much over this because of my kids and my family. A country that protects freedom of movement (gathering, land ownership, religion, etc.) and freedom of speech can survive a lot.
Across a society prioritizing these two things, people can experience The Good Life. Limitations and setbacks are periodical and short lived if the society also has a high trust environment.
In a struggling society, unsure of itself or even attacking itself from within, liberalism becomes much harder to justify. After all, the “other side” just assassinated one of your brightest and most engaged public figure. Why should it be up to you to “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39)?
Unfortunately, I think we have been a struggling society for a while, low in trust, high in anger, disgust, negation, and nihilism.
Events like yesterday can fan that flame exponentially.
Earlier, I read some of Bobby Kennedy’s remarks after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
Which of our leaders is willing to speak this way today? To calm the nation? So far, our president is not. And downstream of him I only see more disgust and name calling between “the sides.”
I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black–considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible–you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization–black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we’ve had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
Yet, I pray!