The Overthinker's Journal

The murder of Charlie Kirk is a vile, disgusting, reprehensible act. Full stop.

There is never a reason to commit political violence because you don’t like someone’s words, no matter how much you disagree with them. It’s horrible.

Just as it was horrible when Melissa Hortman, speaker of the house of Minnesota, and her husband and dog were killed, and Minnesota senator John Hoffman and his wife were shot by someone exacting political violence.

Just as it was horrible when Corey Comparator died and Donald Trump was wounded in Butler, Pennsylvania by someone exacting political violence.

Just as it was horrible when Paul Pelosi was attacked and wounded by someone exacting political violence.

Just as it was horrible when a mob sought to prevent the House of Representatives from completing the count of the Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021, and wanted to exact political violence on Mike Pence and the members of Congress.

Just as it was horrible when…. you get the picture.

But rather than look for a way to bring us back from the brink or to look for a way to find a way to tone down the rhetoric, what does our President say?

Well, first he goes on a rant about “Radical Left Violence” and completely ignores violence against anyone he disagrees with.

Then he says:

“I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime. Worried about the border. They’re saying, We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street,” Trump said.

“The radicals on the left are the problem,” Trump continued, “and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy, although they want men and women sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.”

Trump manages to not only go out of his way to excuse any violence on the Right, echoing his tweet early in his presidency that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

He then doubles down and attacks the Left for the violence, and attacks their viewpoints as being the problem… in effect creating the very same scenario of endorsing violence against someone for their views.

If it weren’t so sad that this is where we are as a country, it would be laughable for the President to act as though committing acts of violence were not a problem for him and his supporters.

Just last week, he declared war on an American city.

I will even give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s talking only about undocumented immigrants in Chicago, and not the US citizens that live there. Still, the enforcement of immigration laws is a civil act, not a criminal one. And it certainly is not one to be enforced by the military. That sounds an awful lot like martial law to me.

And then, to substitute the word “deportations” for what was “napalm” in the original movie quote means that he is equating the act of carrying out this civil enforcement with dropping firebombs on our enemies during a war.

But, I’m going to be honest. I expected no better from him. I mean, this was the man who, when the bodies were still in the Potomac River, was blaming the crash of American flight 5342 on “hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” despite no evidence that happened, much less that it was involved with the crash.

So I wasn’t expecting anything uniting or comforting out of him. Another politician’s statement, though, bothered me more.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox described what he was doing between the assassination and the capture of the suspect.

For 33 hours, I was praying that if this had to happen here that it wouldn’t be one of us. That somebody drove from another state, someone came from another country. Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way that I hoped for.

He was praying that the killer wasn’t one of us.

He wanted it to be one of them. He wanted a scapegoat. He wanted to be able to say “it was one of those Blue Staters!” Or “It was one of those illegals!”

To pray to God… not for Him to ease the pain and suffering that Charlie Kirk’s family was going through… Not to ease the pain of his followers who were hurting… Not to bring down the temperature in this country so another event like this is less likely to take place…Not to find a way for a broken nation to heal…..

No, he prayed to God that it be a “them” he could blame.

So when it turned out the suspect was a Utahan from a conservative family, Cox still looked for a “them” to blame.

Cox said that what investigators had gathered showed Robinson “does come from a conservative family – but his ideology was very different than his family”.

Citing the content of investigators’ interviews with people close to Robinson, Cox said “we do know that the [suspect’s] roommate … is a [partner] who is transitioning from male to female.

“I will say that that person has been very cooperative with authorities” and was “shocked” by what had happened, Cox remarked to Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, referring to the roommate. “And … the why behind this … we’re all drawing lots of conclusions on how someone like this could be radicalized. And I think that those are important questions for us to ask and important questions for us to answer.”

The hatred has to stop.

On all sides.

This is not a football game, where we cheer anything that our side does and boo anything their side does.

We are all in this together.

Hate is never the answer.

I’ll give you your choice of verses to close…..

Religious:

One of the scribes asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?”

Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.

– Mark 12:28-31, NRSV

Secular:

“There ain’t no good guy,
There ain’t no bad guy,
There’s only you and me,
and we just disagree.“

– Dave Mason, “We Just Disagree“