Charlie Kirk/YouTube

And the threat to reason

For all of those on social media and elsewhere now offering their views on the vile things, true or untrue, that the late Charlie Kirk might or might not have said, I have a message:

Take a deep breath and think about what you are doing.

Because what you are doing is acting as an enabler for the next mentally unstable individual who doesn’t like someone’s message. And the target of that individual might be the person whose messaging you happen to love or like.

The assassination of Kirk on a Utah college campus is not a lefty issue or a righty issue. It is a life and death issue, and all of those voicing the opinion that “of course it is terrible that someone shot Charlie Kirk, but yadda, yadda, yadda….Kirk said this and he said that and he was a terrible person,” are doing nothing but encouraging the next shooter.

Why?

Because the people messed up enough to commit political assassinations in this country don’t see nuances. What they see is that some people will think them a hero for killing the “enemy,” and all you are doing with your posturing on the evils of Charlie Kirk is reinforcing this belief.

I say this not as a Charlie Kirk fan because I can honestly say I am a fan of no one. I grew up in Minnesota as a fan of the Minnesota Vikings football team, which managed to lose four Super Bowls, and in the process, thankfully, teach me how badly fandom can distort one’s vision.

I took this understanding with me into a life that pretty quickly became immersed in journalism, and there realized that the worst thing a journalist can do is become a fan, especially of political parties,  because of the way fandom subtly and otherwise distorts reality.

I am now watching the twin of fandom  – anti-fandom – play out on social media where too many old journalism colleagues or acquaintances are busy suggesting, in one way or another, that Kirk invited his deadly end.

Were they devout Christians, which is not to say any of them are unreligious, they would no doubt be turning to Hosea 8:7 to explain that those who have sown the wind shall reap the whirlwind.

Personally, I’m an agnostic. I have nothing against Christianity. It has been involved in both good and bad through history. But it’s a fan thing.

And fan thinking all too often trumps reason.

These unUnited States are witnessing the fan problem now from both sides with Kirk the centerpiece. His assassination has led to his increasingly being viewed on one side as a modern-day God and on the other as the devil reincarnate.

In reality, he was neither. He was a man who liked a good argument. He traveled around the country to engage in debates with college students. He was, for godsake, at Utah Valley University, where he was shot dead, for a “Prove Me Wrong” tour focused on arguing with college students with different beliefs.

Isn’t this exactly what any thinking person should want to see on American college campuses? Are those now busy quoting Kirk, or misquoting Kirk by ignoring context, of the view that he was some sort of Svengali who should never have been allowed to engage with university students because he would magically overpower their individual reasoning as to what is right and wrong?

I hope not. Colleges are not supposed to be indoctrination centers. They are supposed to be hotbeds for debate. Wide-ranging debate. Debate that might at times be uncomfortable.

And if some truly believe that Kirk was asking to get shot, a view expressed by more than a few, by engaging in these debates on college campuses, we have an even bigger problem in this country than our increasing acceptance of and sometimes apparent love for violence as the cure to almost anything as long as the victim of that violence is a member of some opposite “team.”