By Rod Miller And Clair McFarland
Charlie Kirk was assassinated Wednesday while speaking at a college in Utah. There will be many details forthcoming, as the investigation into Kirk’s murder progresses. But make no mistake, Charlie Kirk was killed for speaking his mind.
The footage circulating online shows Kirk uttering the words "gang violence" and then suffering what looks like a gunshot to the neck.
Kirk’s style of engaging with young people is widely known and recognizable. Not quite a trademark, but he did it more actively than anyone else: the back-and-forth, the conversation, the debate.
Sometimes that devolved into "the own."
In America, we risk getting "owned" by a conservative (or liberal) influencer once in a while, when we teeter onto the beam of free speech.
A little blushing, a little back-pedaling, and we're on our way: embarrassed, but free to be embarrassed in the crossfire of ideas.
It is this free exchange of ideas that flows from the First Amendment to our Constitution. Our national discourse has room for all points of view, even if those ideas are odious to some. Our guarantee to say what is on our mind makes each of us uniquely American, and to thwart that freedom with violence in the marketplace of ideas diminishes us all.
To accept what happened to Charlie Kirk as somehow par for the course is to say that, in America, violence is more powerful than words, that bullets are more important than ideas.
To say Kirk deserved to be shot for his point of view is reprehensible.
But even as we recognize how reprehensible that notion is and feel it pucker places the Constitution doesn’t address, we can’t take the bait.
We can’t meet violence with violence.
Let words be your sword. Let ideas be your honing stone.
And if you can’t enter the debate because your ideas suck and you stumble over your words, just listen for a while.
Consider the painstaking thought that formed our Constitution and its declarations of rights. Consider the forge that produced them.
A convention. A meeting.
A bunch of young bucks and their token old guy — Benjamin Franklin, the titan of outspokenness and the press's true patron saint — swapping ideas. Not crossing swords.
They made an America where words are mighty.
We are both journalists. That means we belong to the only occupation whose freedom to operate is enshrined in the same First Amendment that guaranteed Charlie Kirk’s freedom of speech. The national cacophony of rhetoric erupting in reaction to Kirk’s murder is also protected by the First Amendment, even if some of it might make your skin crawl.
But as journalists, our loyalties must lie with the Constitution and the freedoms that it guarantees, not with one side or another in this acrimonious debate.
We fumble as a nation for something to help us rise above the murky political resentment and tribalism that grip our country and poison our thinking.
For us, that something is our liberty as citizens of the United States to express ourselves freely. When anyone, for any reason, tries to negate that freedom through violence, we must speak up.
And we must bridge our lesser differences to do so.
Clair McFarland can be reached at: Clair@CowboyStateDaily.com
Rod Miller can be reached at: rodsmillerwyo@yahoo.com
