“When a public figure dies, you are not obligated to manufacture sorrow for someone who did not live in a way that earned your compassion,” wrote psychotherapist Dr. Dionne Mahaffey-Muhammad yesterday in a public Facebook post that I’ve begun sharing online. “There is a difference between refusing to speak ill of the dead and forcing yourself to honor a life that may have caused harm.”
“Choosing not to mourn someone who caused harm is not out of alignment with your spiritual beliefs,” she continued. “Grief is not a performance, and empathy is not an endless well. You are allowed to acknowledge limits. That doesn’t make you coldhearted, and it doesn’t mean you are wishing harm on anyone. It simply means you are being honest about your boundaries.?”
At this point, I’ve heard more sympathy from the president and media about Kirk’s murder than I’ve heard about school shooting victims regularly gunned down in their classrooms, thousands of Palestinian civilians slaughtered in Gaza, or Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman (D) being slain by a right-leaning assassin last June — as if Kirk’s life matters more than all of theirs. And then people wonder why some of us aren’t particularly saddened by the death of this one wealthy bigot.
We’re told we should be horrified because no one deserves to be murdered for their political beliefs, because Kirk’s killer is still at large, and because — in the words of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and countless others — “political violence has absolutely no place in our nation.”
But, as fellow journalist Hunter Walker pointed out yesterday, “Political violence has been a feature of American life from the Revolution, to the genocide of indigenous peoples, to slavery, mass lynching of Blacks and Latinos, the turmoil of the 60s, to mass shootings, to January 6, and Charlie Kirk’s killing.”
You’re telling me that I’m supposed to condemn the murder of a wealthy and politically super-connected bigot who spent every moment of his life actively vilifying and fomenting violence against the most marginalized among us, and then weep when his own hatred inevitably backfired against him?
Kirk’s murder is shocking, but no less shocking than the decades-long, state-sanctioned violence committed against whoever the police, the president, and other federal authorities consider to be worthy targets: We largely criminalize immigrants and the poor, neglect the sick and the old, and persecute those who protest for social justice, vilify them all as stupid and dangerous and then either jail them, mock them online, or otherwise leave them to rot.
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