[FOX] "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
William Butler Yeats wrote those words about Europe after the Great War, but they ring with terrible clarity this week as we bury Charlie Kirk, murdered at 31 for the crime of arguing in public. The young man who built an empire of discourse from a suburban garage has been silenced by someone who apparently found bullets more persuasive than words.
But here is what strikes me as I reflect on this tragedy: Charlie Kirk may have been the last American who genuinely believed you could change someone's mind with a good argument. Think about that. When was the last time you saw someone actually switch positions during a debate? When did you last witness someone say three of the most treasured words in the English language: "I was wrong?"
My younger son understood this belief. He called me after Kirk’s death and shared something that possibly captured our national descent. "Dad," he said, "I used to be like Charlie Kirk— I used to think people could be persuaded with reason."
My son learned otherwise during the 2016 election, while in graduate school. He started getting several calls a day from classmates wanting to understand how he could support someone they genuinely believed was the modern-day equivalent of Hitler. These graduate students—educated, intelligent people pursuing MBAs—literally thought Trump was on par with Hitler and were calling my son because they could not reconcile how someone like him could support such evil.
So, in good faith, he engaged everyone who contacted him. From his own account: "I came to business school to learn things like accounting, not to practice defending myself from being called a Nazi. I lost friends through this period, and it ended up being one of the hardest times of my life."
Let me advance an unconventional thesis: Charlie Kirk died because we have forgotten how to hate properly. G.K. Chesterton observed that "the true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind [or next to] him." We fight not for hatred of our enemies but love of our fellow soldiers and the ideals of our country. We have inverted this wisdom. We teach our young people to hate their opponents rather than love their own principles. We have made politics a blood sport precisely because we have drained it of transcendent meaning. When you believe in nothing greater than your own righteousness, the only thing left is to destroy those who challenge your certainty.
As my son lost friends, he did something quite understandable. Shortly after Trump's election, he stopped actively participating in politics—watching the news, talking about it with friends, and reading the articles he used to read daily. "I found myself getting physically uncomfortable when the news came on," he told me. "Defending yourself against being called a Nazi, racist, sexist, endlessly just for communicating relatively common-sense ideas like boys go to the boys' bathroom and girls go to the girls' bathroom, or that throwing Molotov cocktails into police cars is a bad idea (something a classmate of his actually did during the George Floyd protests) just gets really draining after a while."
|