“When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group,” says Charlie Kirk in a video clip, one of many showing up on our social media feeds today. It seems profoundly poignant now. The most brutal, frightening clips of his murder are also beginning to appear. One moment, he is about to speak. The next, instead of a word, instead of what probably began as a pause, a moment of silence to listen to his interlocutor’s response, is his fall. Then, a split-second later, the cracking sound of the gun.
Is this the price we are going to have to pay now for “human connection?” Why does someone, then, take the risks they do (assuming wanting to show up in person and verbally challenge people’s beliefs is a risky business in the first place)? Is it only to “divide” and spread “hate” as many critics might say? Or, is it conviction, a desire for a particular kind of connection, that of a mentor to a cohort of youth feeling like they do not get the direction they once did from their elders, to a generation feeling unheard, despite the greatest tools of communication tech in their hands?
Confronted by the palpable immensity of this tragedy, many prominent political figures on the other side of the political divide in America have rightly offered condolences. Yet, words of utter callousness and contempt for life also appear now on social media. Here and there, the screenshots, the “owns”, the retreats and deletions after failing to “read the room”, insensitive words which will pour out into the world mocking a brutal death, as if somehow the “harm” he had done, or the positions he had taken on issues before justifies the finality of what has happened to a man.
It is so easy in the social-media age, in this cacophony of fragmented connections, of malcontent and over-connection, to litigate our own version of justice on the flimsy basis of the last flicker of a thought that popped into our heads. Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk… wait? Wasn’t he the guy who said to send the immigrants back? Or that trans people aren’t real people? Or guns should be available easily? The answers to some of these questions may be yes, and disagreeable. And yet, to know the difference — and the enormity of that difference — between a stupid opinion and an irrevocable action, somehow that was the gamble on human nature or goodness that perhaps Kirk, and most of human society, counted on. And still counts on.
It has been a week of dull terror in America already. A young woman on a train in Charlotte is stabbed. But there is nothing in the news. Then, the screenshots appear, media activism in the hands of those hurt by media bias, censorship, obstinacy, most of all, thousands of mentions in the “legacy” media for George Floyd, but none for Iryna Zarutska — a Ukrainian woman who fled to the US in 2022 and who was stabbed to death recently.
Then, President Donald Trump himself speaks up.
When President Trump speaks, it matters. He spoke his way after all from a moment of petty mockery by President Obama long ago to two triumphant wins. He speaks zanily sometimes, a classic move in the repertoire of a classic negotiator, a fine spinning wheel in the art of the deal. Boasts, bravado, insults, compliments gushing with warmth, all of them a part of his tremendous communicative persona.
When Trump speaks, whether he knows it or not, he makes reality happen. For the unacknowledged Zarutska. For his friend Kirk. He is a leader. America’s leader. No matter how much his critics hate that, that is still the reality.
And from that reality, there is one paramount question now, in these unreal times when people have stopped noticing the horror of murder and death: Can President Trump bring America back to a sense of reality, particularly about the value of human life?
When he speaks, or his surrogates pontificate, what will be the bottom-line in their moral project? Will it be universal human decency, fairness and rule of law, as they promised Americans before the elections? Or will it be about tribes, about “us and them”? Will we think of this week’s tragic victims as someone’s father, someone’s daughter, deserving of everyone’s compassion, or will it feed one more spiral of identity-based blame-games (a spiral in which Trump’s rivals played no small role too)?
The key question for America now is this: Did Trump win for all Americans who wanted a fair and competent America back, or only for a Whites-first, or Whites-only (or even Whites-at-least-not-last) Americans? His constituents include all these categories maybe, and many first-time non-White supporters who swung his way too. Where it will go from here is not clear.
The word “divider” appeared in class discussions today about Kirk. It was sad. It was also ironic. When I stepped into my classroom today, I had no idea that every single student would be talking about him. After all, so many things happen now which seem important to you because of your phone’s feed which someone else would not know. I told my students the example of Zarutska’s death. Friends of mine living in the same state that the murder took place did not know of it. They only read “legacy” media.
But for once, in these rarely unifying times, a tragedy had brought together the community, briefly. I shared memories of my first semester teaching in that same building, 24 years ago, a day before the 9/11 attacks. I shared memories of other “celebrity murders” because my students wanted to know. Colleges. Places of learning, community, communication. Then, censorship. Then, snark. Finally, murder.
The words from a Pandit Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass song played in my mind as we left: Hey naath, hum par Krupa keejiye… Himsa, dwesh, lobh, hum se cheen leejiye.Tear away from us this cruelty, resentment, and greed, O Lord.
Maybe it is not us who are divided as much as the mirrors which have trapped us into our most unnatural reflections and exaggerations of ourselves.
In the end, we are still people who feel sorrow for the death of a stranger, a stranger who we would have not known at all but for that microphone he held in his hand even as he lay dying.
E pluribus unum, again, someday.
The writer is professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco
