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| "But they sent me thoughts and prayers!" "Yes. This is what they prayed for." |
Last week something kept bugging me. See, we and by we I mean the United States*, but I also mean we because it IS an extension of me, blew up a boat.
There was a boat at sea. We blowed it up. 11 people were in the boat. We blowed them up.
My problem is that it'd been a week since and I hadn't ever read the names of those 11 people. Did we* even know? Did we know?
The President said it was a boat full of Tren de Aragua Terrorists. And to me that made no difference. If it's a boat full of terrorists and you have good intel surely you can show us their names.
I went to the Wikipedia article and followed a source to a Spanish language site which purported to know specifics about them. They did at least have some pictures.
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| No pics of the boat in better times. |
And it bothered me because we were having a public discussion about the manner and method and legal explanation why 11 people were destroyed at sea, and it all felt so distant and impersonal, even from the ones that were strongly against doing that, and I suspected we didn't even KNOW who we killed. You say 11 people, you could mean 11 hardened killers, or you could mean 11 fat schoolgirls. And of course, legality or no, the headline "U.S government destroys boat, 11 fat schoolgirls killed" would make you feel different about it.
We all agree that every life is worth the same, when asked. Very few people when ask will hand you back a tier list of where different kinds of people land. That's what monsters do, and you and me, we're not monsters. We value human life because it's the most irreplaceable thing. Once a life is extinguished it can never be brought back. So when directly asked people will tell you the answer that says to others and mostly to themselves that they are not a monster who doesn't value life.
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| This must be that famous Hillbilly Elegy they talked about. |
Last week Charlie Kirk was involved in a shooting and died.
This is technically the truth, but did you see how much power it takes from it to say it like that?
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| Involved how? Were they the bullet? |
No, of course not. We can't use passive voice for him. Mr Kirk didn't just die. He was ASSASSINATED, he was MURDERED. Maybe killed. But maybe killed is too soft. Killed is for 11 random Venezuelans in a boat.
We all think all life is precious and irreplaceable and all people's lives are worth the same when polled. Yet we live in a country where The Death Penalty is broadly popular. We live in a country where the police kills people and gets away with it and this is not cause for great concern. This is the country where you can drown women and children and get reelected after it, if those are the right women and children. You can drown those children those children and take glee in it, but not these childrenthese children.
Maybe we're fooling ourselves. Maybe we don't value all life equally. Maybe that's just something we tell ourselves, and then when the time comes we start carving exceptions for who's worth something and who's worth less than something, with ourselves and people like us near the top.
A lot of discussion of Mr Kirk's life and acts has been made, with some people having less than reverential tones about it. See? passive voice again. You could say many people were CELEBRATING HIS DEATH. MOCKING HIS DEATH. it really dares you to feel another way about it.
I remember when my grandfather died. He had been a mostly absent father to my father. He wasn't a very loving man. But towards the end of his life...he still wasn't. My father took care of him, but near what I could tell, it was no two sided relationship. He didn't show affection. It was kinda "Do this, take care of this" like they were in a joint venture that only one of them was invested in.
And in the funeral I noticed something odd. I knew I was supposed to cry cuz that's what you do in funerals. But I didn't and that scared me. I felt nothing for this man. We had no relationship. But you're supposed to feel bad when people related to you die. Right?
When people bring up Mr Kirk's output into the world, and how some of it was not particularly positive (again, passive voice to the rescue! It's rude to say he openly advocated for some heinous stuff) or how he willingly made himself the enemy of communities that don't need more enemies, some people will bring up that he had a family. A wife and some children, and I think they were there to see him pass away.
Pass away, right? Is that too passive for what it is? I think that one's TOO passive, even for hardened criminals selling terrorist drugs.
Maybe that's our line. Maybe if you have a spouse and kids, your life is worth something. But that seems kinda arbitrary. Hitler had a wife and Osama Bin Laden had lots of kids. I don't think most people hold their lives as especially important.
And that's not to say Charlie Kirk was a Hitler level person. But let's say he hadn't had any kids. That probably wouldn't make making light of his passing more acceptable, right? Because he was worthy of life, whether he had 0 children to mourn him or 100?
Debating publicly what a person's life is worth quantitatively feels wrong, but maybe we could have taken it up sooner.
See there's another thing that was bugging me earlier this year. A few months ago I read that the result of cutting off U.S.Aid resulted in 14 million people dying.
And I got to thinking "don't people say Hitler killed 11 million Jews...did we* just casually kill more people than The Holocaust?
It took Hitler YEARS to kill that many people and they were making an active effort."
And I decided to look it up and counting every type of victim to The Holocaust it's not. Hitler still has us beat by about 3 million. here's a chart.
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| Special shout out to the Trolley Problem failers on Bluesky! We did it! |
But that didn't make me feel better. We* killed people in Hitler numbers, and we never even managed an outrage.
Maybe it's because we never saw them. The killings in Gaza and Ukraine feel more REAL because there's plenty of visuals about it. There's no live footage of a Sudanese newborn who's health we defunded slowly drifting out of consciousness while his mother begs God for a miracle that will never come.. There's no "killer" unless you think about how it happened at all and why, in which case the killers have names, faces and Twitter accounts.
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| 14 Million AND COUNTING. |
14 million. You couldn't even hope to search for names, but we are talking about millions of orphans, millions of widows, millions of people crying and asking why. Suffering on a scale you can't imagine.
To save money. That's it. for no greater argued purpose than to save money.
We're still trying to find out Mr Kirk's killer's motives or indeed determine if he is a killer in court (which we have to do if you aren't a Venezuelan), but if it turned out he was just trying to ease the national debt by this somehow, would that make it acceptable? Understandable?
I did wind up crying at my grandfather's funeral. It was when I saw my dad cry. I felt his pain. I was sad that he was sad. My grandfather couldn't feel anything and he lived a full and dubious life. But my father was here, now.
It's a dangerous idea to pursue, that of no one deserving to die. If no one deserves to die, then someone probably doesn't deserve to suffer either. And we clearly aren't in a society where no one deserves to suffer. In this one giving kids free school lunches is a yes or no question, and the answer is often no. This is a society where rampant homelessness and jail are just a you problem. This is a country where having a gun is a right but having a choice over your gender isn't.
This is The School Shooting country, the only country that's so self centered that children being shot is not an outrage that demands change. Every other country.
This is the country that looked at you point blank in the face and told you to sacrifice your grandma and grandpa during covid for the economy. And people did.
This is the country that wants to send paramilitary forces to catch a flower salesman and send him to a special jail with a cutesy nickname.
This is the country where indifference and cruelty are king and queen.The country where Empathy is a sin. The country where evil is law.
You can say that all life has value and that Mr Kirk was as valuable as anyone and that we shoud respectfully mourn him and that there's no room for that kind of violence. But that's kinda bullshit isn't it? You don't really MEAN that. You don't believe every person is worthy of life. You didn't like Charlie Kirk because of your unflinching commitment to a world with less suffering and death, a world where all life is considered equal.
One thing I've noticed in these last few days is there's lots of discussion of the less flattering angles of Mr Kirk's life from his detractors, but no discussions of his good actions by his partisans. And I kinda wonder why.
Most people when you put it all together, probably have a mix of good and bad things they've done. Moments of impulsivity, moments of caring. Moments of love, moments of rage . Beautiful ideas, thoughts of revenge.
But on the whole when you're gone people can probably look past the one moment they had with you that they didn't like and remember the good times. The times you stepped up. The reasons why your death is a loss.
But I don't see a lot of that about Mr Kirk. I see a lot of "He was an activist(for what?) who believed in debate (debating what) and The Second Amendment(which is always passive voice where "the second amendment" isn't even the words in the second amendment.) "
So, seeing as Mr Kirk is worth the same as me, you, those Venezuelans, Gazans, Ukranians, Sudanese Babies, fat schoolgirls, immunocompromised covid victims, flower salesmen, school shooting victims, purple haired gender studies majors, Osama Bin Laden and my grampa, we can focus on what made him stand out in a positive way. What makes him 4 day flags at half mast relevant. All the good things he did. All the lives he improved using his enormous power.
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| Prove me wrong. |
Unless you didn't really LIKE Charlie Kirk. unless you just liked what he did for you and your ideology, and the permissions he gave you to indulge in cruelty. But I don't know you. Maybe if we ask you if all life is valuable you'll say that it is.
you know what I think it is? I think people don't like to think about death. There's a book called Denial of Death, that proposes basically all that we do we do to avoid thinking about how we're gonna die. I don't subscribe to that in an absolute way but... it's not fully wrong. Death occupies a lot of our brain bandwidth. Mortality, immortality, legacy it's all at least passively moving around there.
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| Just a selfie with the homie. |
You might not be a rich white guy big shot political figure, but you can relate to not wanting to spend your last moments bleeding to death in front of your kids.
So I think what's happening is you're seeing someone heckled the day he died for being what he was and it scares you that this is how people will see you...this is what people see you as now, as a future punchline and recipient of that one Yugi Oh Meme.
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| See In cleverly made this about how morally bankrupt YOU are. |
I often think about how it feels to die. How it is. How if your mind has a slight delay, maybe I'm already dead and I haven't caught up to it. But I am alive and while I'm alive I have a choice, and so do you!
If you want to be remembered positively, you have a choice. You can choose to follow a life where some people are worth less than you, and be remembered for that while people awkwardly try to wallpaper that you had a family over the sum of your life, or you can choose to treat everyone as equal, as your peers and fellow passengers on this good ship Earth and be remembered for what you brought to others. It's your call.
But you better make it fast, you are closer to death than when you started reading this.
