Murder is the taking of another’s life. Whatever the weapon, the killer pulls the life from the victim’s body. What’s left is empty. The killer makes a zero where there had been a 1.
Murder is both the annihilation of history and its engineer. It removes a person from what he or she would have done with the rest of a life. It makes future children, future wives and husbands, future good works (or evil ones too) go poof. The living rush into the vacuum and engineer another reality. One entire set of possibilities has been wiped out of the world. One new set of facts moves into all those empty spaces and begins to exert its own peculiar series of forces, actions, events and consequences.
Whatever Charlie Kirk believed in, he was a human being. No white man with a long rifle had any right to murder him. No one, and no government, has the moral authority to simply declare a person an enemy and worthy of execution. That this happens is wrong and will always be wrong. That must be a first principle of any system of moral beliefs.
However, we now live in the time of online mobs and influencers who must have clicks to make their nut. We live in the golden era of conspiracists and anonymous cruelty and patterns of a despicable stupidity unique to my lifetime. Add those to the old, old law of heat bringing attention and thus so many voices rising up online calling for mayhem to be directed towards whomever is the enemy of the moment – a health executive, cops protecting Congress, Minnesota lawmakers, women and children in aid lines in Gaza, women and children at Be’eri Kibbutz, Nancy Pelosi (whose husband bore the assault), brown people going to work, children at Mass or in a classroom, worshipers in a synagogue or a mosque, a right wing provocateur.
If you know someone who brandishes his or her voice as a weapon, who calls for the death of x, y or z, who calls for vengeance against any assortment of enemies or for general violence as retribution for an act or an opinion, ask that person one simple question: who will you murder?
Do not make it a hypothetical question as in who would you murder.
Make it direct, urgent, timely.
Who will you murder?
Watch their faces. You’ll know soon enough who it is who is standing before you.
