This is one of those moments where so many things can be true at the same moment in time.
Charlie Kirk was not someone I would ever say I followed or agreed with. I watched or read about him only what I needed to know--like someone trying to understand an adversary, an ideological foe.
He was a conservative extremist. Someone whose ideas did not match mine, and ones that I personally believe have helped ingrain and impregnate hate, bigotry, and racism into a multitude of generations, old and young. That language and ideology I believe contribute to actions which suppress, torture, and kill of members of BIPOC and immigrant communities, either by direct violent action, or through tenets that uphold laws and structures of power meant to disenfranchise its citizens, leading to shortened lives.
But I am also a First Amendment advocate, and while I do believe the above, I still feel someone like Charlie Kirk, did not deserve to be assassinated while giving a talk at a university, just like I believe someone shouldn't go to jail for a year for burning the flag.
If we are about Freedom of Speech, we must be about ALL Freedom of Speech. That ALL speech is protected. even if we don't like it, agree with it, because that's the way it's always been. That's the only reason that freedom works and it's fundamental to who we are as a country.
You can't muzzle that with a gun. If anything, especially in this case, it will only make the din louder, the words broadcast farther, enabling new cohorts.
Charlie Kirk's family shouldn't be grieving a loss of a son and father at this time. No one involved in the event and those who went to it, should ever have had to witness such a horrific event.
I think at our base, we all understand that.
But it also doesn't mean we forget about his coordination with the January 6th riots and the deaths that occurred during the insurrection. Or that we can't argue that his words could, and still can, incite violence, and that he should have been held responsible--under the law.
Or that I have to grieve his passing--because he didn't like people like me.
He would not care if I was caught up in an ICE raid because I was there protesting and they decided I may not be a citizen, then was detained. He wouldn't care if I was mistreated, away from my family for months, or even if I was killed.
I would just be a Woke Dead Chink to him.
In that way, it's like asking the abused to grieve and mourn their abuser(s).
Who does that?
His death, his assassination--horrific as it was--doesn't nullify what his life stood for and the things he said and did, putting so many communities in harm's way.
I will mourn the life of a human being taken too early and not of their own volition, an injustice in any world, but I don't think I can do that, at least right now, with the man.
