Yep. But not the last part. Maybe not the end of my days.
Many of the condemnations have described Kirk’s assassination as “senseless.” It’s an interesting word. I’m assuming they either mean it serves no purpose or that it could not have been anticipated.
The words I would use to describe the assassination are words like devastating, or tragic. Charlie Kirk’s death is tragic on two levels- the private human tragedy of a wife and children who lose a husband and father in the most shattering possible way, and the tragedy for American Democracy.
I brought up the Reichstag fire earlier. This ain’t that, but what they have in common is that it doesn’t really matter who did it or even what their motive was. What matters is that it provided power and energy to drive historical forces in a certain direction, to drive Europe to war. It “made sense” in the context of its moment.
Assassinations are like that and in some ways that’s what separates them from murders. The Minnesota lawmakers were assassinated because their murders fit into “the way things are going,” as people say. They fit into the de-civilizing shift from politics to other means.
Frank Ferdinand was assassinated. So were Lincoln, Anwar Sadat, Ghandi, Allende, Yitzhak Rabin, and so on. Marinus Lubbe may have set the Reichstag fire but he’s not a major character. He just played the role of “arsonist”. Even though Gavrilo Princip set events in motion that took 100 million lives, he’s not widely seen as a major villain. In Serbia he’s a national hero, but mostly he’s just the guy who happened to play the role of inevitable spark that sets the world on fire and if it wasn’t him it would have been somebody else. Did Lubbe set the fire? Did Jefferson Davis orchestrate the conspiracy to kill Lincoln? Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone? Does it *aftually* matter?
When Princip pulls the trigger all the pieces are in place for World War. When Lincoln died the pieces are in place to roll back reconstruction. When Kennedy goes to Dallas the pieces are in place in Vietnam, big business is eyeing Vegas, and the largest generation in history is already starting to think out loud about whether the whole structure of society is a meat grinder.
My point is that until we know who did it, we won’t know the specifics of why Kirk died. But we intuitively understand why, because it sadly, tragically fits into the way things are going. We don’t know how this chapter of history ends (it will end, but we don’t know how or when), but it feels like we’re in the climax, the moment when things get really bad.
But they don’t have to! There have been other times when it felt this way. There’s always another chapter. The farmer’s son falls from his horse and is injured. People console the farmer. “We’ll see,” he says. War breaks out and the army doesn’t take his son. People are happy for the farmer. “We’ll see.”
You know my point of view and my posture here remains the same. It goes bad a long, long time: I walk in the sunshine, I try to be a good neighbor, I buy Green Tips, and pray to never need them. My priorities are to do good, work hard and have a good time. With any luck my grandchildren will tell their kids about their silly old grandfather, a jolly old soul with malice towards none who armed himself for reasons which, in retrospect, made no sense.