Last week, my newsfeed erupted with a breaking story: Charlie Kirk, a well-known political figure in America, was shot and killed while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University.
I don’t know much about him — or, if I should.
This isn’t actually about him. The point is, I learnt of his story because the response to it was impossible to ignore.
If you have been watching or reading the responses, you will have seen something disquieting: a great divide in how people react.
Some posts glowed with triumph. Some messages celebrated the bullet; others seemed to treat the incident as though it were a vote won.
These reactions should disturb anyone with a sense of humanity.
Let’s take the man’s name out of the equation for a moment. Here are the facts, as presented by world media: he was speaking on stage, legally, in public.
He was married. He had young children. He wasn’t committing any crime when he was murdered.
Yet some responses included applauding the shot that killed him, urging the same fate for others, erupting in laughter, sharing dark jokes, cheering violence. Those are not disagreements — they are a celebration of death.
Have we lost the plot? If someone is murdered, allegedly with intent, and leaves children fatherless, how on earth can that be cause for triumph?
I didn’t know Kirk, or follow him. You might not have either. This is a call to remember that all our differences, political or otherwise, are secondary to our humanity.
In what world do we cheer a man’s death because we disagree with him?
When did we allow our political views to strip away our respect for human life?
When did compassion become optional in the marketplace of opinion? Because a life ended — and death is not a debate point.
This applies to every war or violent event that occurs across the globe.
The worst part is not that such responses exist, but that they feel normal in some circles.
We argue over facts, over ideology, over blame — but celebrating someone’s death because of disagreement, using that as a measure of “justice” or “victory,” corrodes something fundamental in all of us.
One of the ways that those in power, or who seek to be, impose their rule is to apply the age-old tool: divide and conquer.
Each time we sacrifice basic, human decency on the altar of opinionism, we slide further into a place that makes us easier for tyrants and oligarchs to control. That’s my take on it, anyway.
A national newspaper this week described Kirk as “irrelevant” in SA. That may be so. But that’s not the point.
Violence is always relevant and worth working against, whether it’s across the world or around the corner.
In the moments when outrage shouts loudest, compassion is what holds us together. Or, at least, it should.
The Herald