We’ve all met people who tell us that there is virtue and decency in all people. Whenever I hear that at a cocktail party, during an academic speech, or during a religious sermon, I conclude that it comes from those who have lived cloistered lives. Although I can’t blame them for being naïve, inasmuch as they have no experience with the darker side of human nature, I think they’re doing a disservice to their listeners because it provides them with false and dangerous information. Convincing them that all people are trustworthy is setting them up for tragedy when they open their door to that innocent-looking stranger.
It’s one thing to profess love and brotherhood as a philosophical concept. It is quite another to disarm your fellow man with the meretricious argument that suspicion is paranoia. Everyone is born with a certain amount of survival instinct. It’s our primordial self-defense radar. That doesn’t mean you go through life suspiciously eyeing each person you encounter. It does mean that you learn about people before you trust them to be civilized. One can only imagine how many lives could have been saved if the ultimate victims had been more cautious about their surroundings.
My years as a cop taught me to never sit with my back to strangers. That’s not paranoia; it’s understanding that there are evil people out there.
When I watched that horrible video of Iryna Zarutska, the 23-year-old Ukrainian woman who walked onto a train filled with strangers and blithely sat with her back to a homicidal monster, I felt as though I was watching a scary movie and yelling at the screen for the woman to get out of there. Here I am, a man 6’1” tall and weighing 190 lbs. However, had I walked onto that train car, I’d have found a seat against a wall, or I’d have been standing for the duration. It would have never occurred to me to sit with my back to anyone, let alone a disheveled-looking stranger. That poor, trusting woman didn’t have a suspicious bone in her body, and it cost her her life.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk came from another type of evil — the type that tries to justify its violence with specious claims of moral superiority. In other words, cold-blooded murder is a virtue if the killer disagrees with the victim’s views. To be sure, Charlie Kirk wasn’t naïve; he knew full well that evil exists. That’s why he devoted his life to teaching our young to value human life, in and out of the womb. Kirk visited colleges across the country, criticizing the insanity of left-wing dogma that preached the idea that men can get pregnant and parents should be allowed to mutilate their children to alter their sex. During a saner time in our history, such madness would have been dealt with in a rubber room, with a psychiatrist in attendance.
However, we don’t live in an age of common sense and rational thinking. Malevolent propaganda has been embedded into the adolescent minds of generations of well-meaning but easily persuadable children. Con artists in the media had convinced their little dupes to rage against reality and engage in schadenfreude when those who spread a doctrine of decency get silenced with bullets. Kirk was on a mission to erase the mental virus that had corrupted a large portion of the Tyler Robinson Gen Z. That made him dangerous to the vindictive mob of reprobates who need those dupes to vote Democrat in future elections. The bullet that took Charlie Kirk’s life came from a brainwashed little turd who didn’t have the mental acuity to engage in civil debate, so he reached for a gun.
We lost a champion of family values, but we gained some new insight into the evil that hovers over us, whether in a small train car at night or in broad daylight at a large university campus.
Where our country goes from here will depend on how many of us will honor Kirk’s legacy by sharing his message of spiritual revival through honest debate and respect for opposing opinions. The current climate of violent rhetoric and bitter hostility can be subdued only when comity in the political and social arena is restored.
Charlie gave his life trying to end the psychosis that had distorted reality and impaired the commonsense reasoning that had united us as a nation. Let’s make certain that he didn’t die in vain.
Image: Charlie Kirk. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.