I won’t miss Charlie Kirk. I’m sad for the people who were there and witnessed a horrific public murder. I am exhausted and numbed to all this gun violence and I’m especially tired of the right wing bullshit about gun rights. I’m confounded and baffled by the bizarre depths of alt-right internet subculture. I’m profoundly disappointed and disillusioned by the state of the United States, but neither am I the least bit shocked. I fear for the deeper divide the next generation faces as fanatical parents drive their children to extremism as others quietly steer theirs towards acceptance, empathy, and inclusiveness.
Charlie Kirk was objectively a garbage human being. I will not mourn him. But nobody should be fucking murdered. The violence and hatred coming from the right is fucking insane and intolerable. We’re being led by sycophants, liars, sociopaths, and incompetent grifters hell bent on upending the entire structure of our ordered existence so they can rebuild it into something nightmarish and dystopian. We’re in the endgame now. The Democrats do not have a time machine.
Normally, I’d agree with your dad. And I mostly still do. I’m not quite sure how this stacks up against previous crises. I have no doubt, for example, the Cuban Missile Crisis was pants-shittingly terrifying. But we don’t have firm hands on the rudders here to steer us back from the brink of madness.
We’ve discarded the Constitution. We’re disregarding rule of law. We’ll survive, in all likelihood, persevere, in some fashion. What I’m afraid of is what we lose - who we lose - in this nightmare timeline.