O P I N I O N
NOT THAT PROFOUND
By Nathan Graziano
Social media was aflame this week with sanctimonious posts from both sides of the political spectrum.
Conservatives and MAGA supporters are rightfully castigating those particularly callous folks on the left who found cause for celebration over the assassination of the far-right Christian nationalist podcaster Charlie Kirk, while simultaneously refusing to address the topic of gun violence or the fact that this is far from an isolated occurrence of political violence.
While police are still investigating the alleged shooter’s motive, it seems that this wasn’t a liberal, leftist plot to silence Kirk.
Admittedly, Kirk’s worldview was antithetical to my own, and I find just about all of his opinions repugnant, although I agreed with his call for DOJ to release all of the Epstein files. But I am a champion of the First Amendment, and Kirk had every right to speak his beliefs without being harmed.
However, I am far more concerned with not only the escalation of political violence in this country, but rising hostilities that the assassination has produced in an already intractably polarized and bitter nation.
While there is nothing unique about the keyboard warriors and trolls on social media airing their grievances behind a screen—believe me, I know—this feels different, more ominous and combustible. Even from the sidelines, I’ve been watching friends and families lashing out at each other in ways that seem deeply personal and permanent.
Of course, this is nothing new in the United States of America. Anyone who has ever scratched their way through a U.S. History course knows that there is a long, bloody history of civil unrest in the nation.
And, for some reason, I keep returning to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 when Brown, a radical abolitionist, led a raid on a federal armory in Virginia—now West Virginia—with the intent of distributing the weapons to slaves and igniting a revolt that would end the institution of slavery in the country.
The raid1 failed, and Brown was executed for treason in December of 1859.
However, the raid is frequently referenced as one of the bellwether events that escalated the tensions between the North and South, the free and slave states, leading to more radicalized ideologies and eventually the Civil War.
I hope I’m wrong, but Kirk’s assassination seems to be galvanizing both sides of the political and ideological spheres. In an already divisive nation—with a president who feeds off chaos and disharmony, and uses it to forward his own agenda—this is, quite frankly, terrifying.
Obviously, I don’t have the solution. I know from being married for more than two decades that telling people to calm down is not particularly effective. And maybe, with the general public’s gnat-like attention span for current events, this will settle down on its own.
Like I said, I hope I’m wrong.
And while Charlie Kirk disparaged empathy and referred to it as a “made-up, new age term” that caused more damage than good, it feels like empathy may be the only antidote for our collective malady of hatred and violence toward those who dissent with our opinions, and we need to cauterize this before it leads more blood on the streets.
And no one, left or right, should have to die for speaking their mind.
- It could also be called “an insurrection” if you’d like wax semantics. ↩︎
You can reach Nathan Graziano at ngrazio5@yahoo.com