Well, to be honest, I actually heard the news first. I spent most of yesterday buried deep in work and I’ve pretty much been off social media all week, and everything I did last night was for personal entertainment. I didn’t touch the news. So, it was not until my ancient clock radio went off this morning and I heard the newsreader on the only station that comes in on it saying, “…the search continues for the gunman who shot and killed Charlie Kirk…” that I heard the news. It got me up, though, that I can tell you. And today, I am sad. Not because someone killed Charlie Kirk, no. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Charlie Kirk was a miserable piece of shit human being who either, a) held to some of the worst beliefs a person can hold, or b) never really believed the shit he was peddling, but peddled it in a cynical bid for relevance and importance because he knew a bunch of assholes believed it, and that was the way to be somebody. As Tom Petty once sang, “I can’t decide which is worse.”
I’m sad because the very first thing that sprang into my head when I heard “…the gunman who killed Charlie Kirk” was not sympathy for the people who loved him and will miss him, as I’m sure there are: the mother and father who raised him; brothers, sisters and friends with whom he may have shared good and bad times with, laughs and loves and all that. No, I’m sad because the very first word that rose in my head on hearing the news was one word: “Good.”
It makes me sad to no end that the world has turned so hard that I can be glad to hear about the death—the violent death—of another person. That I can look at Charlie Kirk’s death at the end of a bullet and think about all the others whose passing would make this world better. It’s not supposed to be this way, but in the world we live in? It’s how I feel.
What came after my initial reaction upon hearing “killed Charlie Kirk” is more complicated, a whole series of thoughts started swirling around my rather quickly woken up brain. What came immediately after that one word, “Good?” The notion that Donald Trump will likely use this as a pretext for further “crackdowns” with the military? That Charlie Kirk was going to become a matyr to the ultra right that the traitor, Ashli Babbitt has become? Or maybe it was, “A conservative bomb thrower dead by gun? Maybe we’ll get some meaningful gun control laws now!” I don’t know which it was; maybe they all rose up at the same time. They started whirling around in my head like papers in the slipstream of a train, but the first thought was “Good,” and it makes me sad. Excuse me, now I need to go and actually read the news to find out what happened, and to make myself more angry when I see what Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the like have to say. I’ll just leave this as a response, and the fact that this is the response also makes me sad:
