Peggy Noonan is so good, She obviously has God-given talent. She has taken that gift and responsibility seriously. She also listens. She listens with the ears of her heart to what is happening and how people are experiencing it, reacting to it, processing it. Even while she does the same.

She’s human, too, after all. We forget that about names we get used to seeing.

She also listens to God.

All of this is on display in her Wall Street Journal column today — a column that’s much needed. I hope it makes its way around college campuses somehow, because young people need to know an adult who loves them is listening to them. That we get what a devastating moment this is for them. I think of young people in journalism and policy and politics in a particular way — some who would credit Charlie Kirk with getting them where they are today.

Peggy writes:

What a disaster all this is for the young. Kirk was a presence in the life of a whole generation of young conservatives, and he set a kind of template for how to discuss politics — with good cheer and confidence, with sincerity and a marshaling of facts. He was literally willing to meet people where they are. Mainstream media has understandably presented him as a political person, but he was almost as much an evangelical one, a Christian unembarrassed to talk about his faith’s importance to him. All the young who followed him saw the horrifying video of the moment the bullet hit him. They will remember it all their lives, it will be part of their understanding of politics in America. They will ask: If you are killed for speaking the truth as you see it, are you really free? Is this a free country?

For young conservatives who have felt cowed or disdained on campus, Kirk’s message was, No, don’t be afraid, stand and argue your position. That he was killed literally while doing that — I am not sure we understand the generational trauma there.

She implores us to pray for our country:

Pray now for America. We are in big trouble.

We all know this. We don’t even know what to do with what we know. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad.

I knew Charlie Kirk only slightly. (In retrospect, I wish I had taken the time to encourage him more along the way — especially in the way he modeled respect for his neighbors who disagreed with him.) And I was nearly working at National Review when he was born. I wasn’t his crowd or audience. But I’m in shock. Those who were his crowd and audiences are exponentially more so.

Peggy should get another Pulitzer for writing this column. I’m printing it and blowing it up so I never forget it’s what we are dealing with:

Part of why this moment is scary is that we are brittler, and we love each other less, maybe even love ourselves less. We have less respect for our own history, our story, and so that can’t act as the adhesive it once was. The assassinations of the 1960s felt anomalous, unlike us. Now political violence feels like something we do, which is a painful thought.

Borrowing from someone who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this November and amazingly had a stamp issued, she advises us to commemorate the same just hours before Charlie Kirk was murdered:

We’re going to have to be strong, not lose our heads, and not give in to demoralization. William F. Buckley used to say, “Despair is a mortal sin.” You wouldn’t feel it if you had faith that God is living through history with you. Hold your hope and faith high and intact, keep your perspective in the long term.

I used the clause about not knowing what to do with what we know because I confess that’s where I’ve felt stuck since the news broke — broke so suddenly that we were no longer praying for Charlie’s physical healing, since he was dead already.

I do encourage you to read her whole column. Especially what she has to say about prayer.

God help Erika Kirk in a particular way, and their children.

God protect those who speak in public in good faith.

God help us.

And God, thank you for Peggy Noonan.