I write this from my daily commuter train. I’m on my way home. My wife is making dinner. My one-year-old daughter is just learning to say “Daddy,” and hopefully, she’ll make an attempt to do so when I come through the door.
Charlie Kirk’s daughter, not so much older than my own, will not have that opportunity tonight. At the moment, I am thinking about that girl and her family. I did not know Charlie. But like most of us in the conservative movement, I knew and appreciated his work as the co-founder and public face of Turning Point USA. With his campus activism, his goal was always to challenge orthodoxy and to inspire an interest in the permanent things.
His death is that. Permanent. We have lost Charlie and, in this life, we will not get him back. In this moment, death is close. To many of us, it’s an unfamiliar feeling. I believe that what separates modernity from everything that’s come before is that: proximity to death.
Relative to almost all of human history, our jobs are safe. Our diet is healthy. An ambulance is only a call away. A constellation of companies have formed to provide convenient solutions to our every discomfort, inconvenience, and problem. We have more distractions and entertainment than our minds could absorb in a hundred lifetimes.
Our dying elderly spend their last days in nursing homes and hospitals, far from our view. But our ancestors, every one of them, lived in constant proximity to death. Medical treatments were rudimentary. Entertainment was one another. They bid farewell to grandfathers and babies and everyone in between in whatever dwelling they shared. Life could be taken away, painfully and without warning, at any time.
I don’t yearn for the conditions of our ancestors. Modern medicine, manufacturing, and communications technology are achievements to be celebrated. But here’s what it leaves us:
We will still die. We just don’t think about it.
Our mortality hasn’t changed. But our culture muffles it with Netflix and social media and selfishness and so on.
Charlie Kirk, who stood athwart this self-medicated malaise, tweeted just days ago, “Jesus defeated death so you can live.” He was a man who considered his mortality. And in his death, we are forced to do the same.
And as we walk this twilight vale, we find ourselves thinking about the permanent things. Who am I? Who (or what) is God? Am I the father or mother or brother or sister I should be? When I am gone, will I be worth remembering?
As conservatives in particular, we don’t just “conserve” the goods of public life for ourselves, but for those who come after. We have been endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and it is incumbent upon us to protect those rights for descendants we will never meet.
The knowledge of death is baked into our political cake.
This moment in history has the feeling of an inflection point in our nation’s history. As Americans we must rise to meet it, as Charlie did, with the permanent things in mind. May God bless and console Charlie, his family, and all of us.