Paradox

A few things can be true at once. This, too, is the burden of consciousness - to hold contradictions together long enough that they stop being contradictions and start being the story.

I never admired Charlie Kirk. His arguments were never arguments, only attacks dressed as reason. His ideas, less the architecture of conviction than the seed by which division reproduces itself. He became the perfect vessel for a country that confuses grievance with critical thought. A man fashioned into the shape of a wound.

And still, I feel for his family. For his wife, his daughters, the people who loved him long before he became a public machine. Empathy doesn’t vanish even when its object labors against it. I never wished him harm. I never wanted his death.

Empathy does not erase comparison. It does not buffer the ache of other losses. I think of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, and her husband, murdered in their home with their dog. Melissa, mother of two, who spent her years assembling the scaffolding of a shared future. She helped create a sanctuary for reproductive choice, meals for every public school child, a reading act grounded in evidence. Free college for those families who earned too little. Paid family and medical leave, non-compete clauses dismantled, summer unemployment extended for school workers, wage theft policed with new teeth. Clean energy shepherded into being by aligning Minnesota with higher standards. The labor of one life bent toward the collective, lasting beyond her own. The ledger of her existence written in real increments of human betterment. Where was her Presidential Address, or flags flown half high in our nation’s capital..?

Kirk’s ledger is different. A mirror image, darkened. Debating whether Martin Luther King Jr. counted as “a good person.” Calling the Civil Rights Act a “mistake.” Announcing that the sight of a black pilot drew from him not trust but fear. Casting LGBTQ lives as a virus. Shaping distrust into his career, conspiracy into sermon. Denying an election everyone saw. Denying an insurrection the cameras documented in real time. Preaching replacement theories and now infamously, advocating for the rights of gun owners over gun violence victims. Charlie sneered at the very idea of empathy: a “damaging invention.” Teaching women that their calling is servitude, their restraint the leash for men’s desires, their pain insufficient even in rape to justify choice. I can go on for days listing all the ways this man was against most of what I stand for… And yet, I feel for his family. The same feeling he considered weak or not real. Even though these are people with whom I do not know personally, I can connect a shared experience of losing a loved one and how painful that can be. These are considerations I’ve made today when internalizing what’s transpired.

But make no mistake, his project remains what it always was, to sink roots in division, to boil resentment into a renewable fuel. A scale of influence so persistent and destructive that Trump honors him by lowering a flag as if he were a head of state. In truth, he was simply the most efficient avatar of corrosion for the youth. Another man turning humans against one another until they forgot they were neighbors.

Still I never wanted him dead. That, too, is true. Both things live beside each other, irreconcilable and inseparable, like so much of what it means to be alive in this country now.

All day the screens filled with their processions. Online and on television, the response unspooled in real time, a nation drafting its own obituary with divided fingers. From the leadership on the Left, most voices carrying a single through line of restraint. Condemnations of the killing, condemnations of gun violence, condemnations of political violence, condemnations of violence itself, no qualifier attached. Again and again, the words returned like the season’s refrain: we cannot live this way.

From the Right, there was no such tightening of the wound. Leaders in office and in studio turned the tragedy into accelerant. They fed it back to their people already primed for fire. They blamed “the left lunatics,” the amorphous cabal of phantoms they keep alive because they cannot govern without them. They fed the cycle of grievance and called it proof of war.

The air itself felt heavier as headlines multiplied, warnings of civil war, whispered not just by pho militia men in the margins but by the very platforms that claim to mediate reality. A country performing its own disintegration on loop. Both sides are not the same.

Charlie Kirk wasn’t a hero. He isn’t a martyr. Still doesnt mean I wished him dead, not murdered, not like that..