My generation won’t forget Kirk.

The night after Charlie Kirk was killed, I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching video after video of his debates with college students my age.

In one of those conversations, a young woman with green hair and a tie-dyed shirt approached the microphone. Before she started speaking, the crowd of young men in MAGA hats behind her was laughing. Kirk immediately asked his supporters to be respectful of her before answering the woman’s question about his argument against abortion.

Kirk’s strong opinions, amplified by social media, made it easy for those who followed him online to forget his humanity in the shadow of his platform. But the humanity of others was something Kirk himself never forgot.

I often disagreed with Kirk, even though I’m a conservative college student. I sometimes found his tactics shallow or scoffed at his takes on first-wave feminism and the value of a college education. Yet he helped form my generation. Many of my close friends consider him an essential contributor to their intellectual and political formations. I respected him as a man and an American who wanted to seek truth and help other young people do the same.

I was in the newsroom of my college paper when Kirk was shot. The usually lively office fell silent as we searched news sites and social media for updates.

When he died, some of the staff joined the hundreds of students who packed into the campus chapel for a student-organized prayer vigil. Athletes and grad students I had never seen in the same room knelt side by side, joining their voices in the Our Father and “It is Well with My Soul.” I watched as one of my professors teared up while leading the assembly in Psalm 46.

My generation won’t forget Kirk. He made college students his audience because he knew we are the inheritors of a tradition we can only steward well if we know how to engage each other in respectful dialogue. Most importantly, he believed freedom of thought and the ability to seek truth through open dialogue are worth protecting. He fought for that conviction, and he died for it.

The respect with which he engaged every person who approached him, no matter what they looked like or what they said, models civil discourse at its best. He challenged others, but he listened first.

For my generation, the assassination of Charlie Kirk is a cultural crisis — akin to an assassination of William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1960s or Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s. How we conduct ourselves in response will determine whether we live in a nation ordered by dialogue and a recognition of human dignity or a nation ruled by violence, where words are punishable by death.

It’s up to us to decide.