My background compels me to focus on the family of the suspect. From what we know they are good parents who raised their children as best they could. And in the face of what occurred the father persuaded his son to surrender. In a death penalty state.
This is a personal catastrophe. The trial. Regret. Loving parents compelled to stand aside as their child is consumed by a system they cannot influence.
And then we have the alleged assassin. He seems ordinary. Unexceptional. Lacking the backstory of Lee Harvey Oswald or the cold stare of Timothy McVeigh. In the days between the crime and arrest we created a monster. Only to be presented with a child ensnared into an ideology that, between now and his possible execution, he may forgo.
Before he lays on the gurney I expect he will have returned to the person his parents raised him to be.
Like many I was aware of Kirk from his videos but had little understanding of his stature across the Pacific. Of his cultural power.
But this doesn’t explain the unsettling impact of his death. He held no office. Was not a celebrity in the traditional Hollywood sense. Kirk’s fame would not have been possible without social media.
By the time of his death he had become known to us through that medium. It was a parasocial relationship.
He was a character in the periphery of our lives. And then he was gone; and the nature of his death is unsettling. It was not illness, accident or the inevitable toll of age that took him from the arena.
Someone decided to kill him and we all saw it happen on the digital Colosseum that the internet has become. He was as alive as any of us have been in the moment his life was stolen.
His death confronts us with the fragility of our own mortality.
We look for meaning in the chaos. The ancients explained the capricious nature of existence by ascribing them to divine whims. The possibility that our lives are governed by a random walk of events is unbearable.
It means that the death of a child has as much moment to the universe as a pebble hitting a pond. And that we cannot accept. So we look for reasons. And when we look for answers we often find them; even if they do not exist.
There are two conflicting ideas struggling for ascendancy. One, that free speech is the ability to say whatever you wish short of inciting violence and two; words themselves can be violent. In this moment the issue being silently debated is that if words are violence then the use of force to stop them becomes permitted.
From what I have seen Kirk was a mainstream Christian conservative but he has been, and continues to be, demonised on questionable evidence.
Author Stephen King stumbled; claiming Kirk advocated stoning homosexuals. He didn’t. King honourably apologised. He was caught by a slew of misleading statements credited to Kirk that became ubiquitous in the hours after his death. At age just thirty-one.
I find it difficult to comprehend the mindset of people who have achieved far less over their much longer lives trolling through his content searching for fragments to take out of context.
There is mischief to this mischaracterisation. It contains a hint that his death was permissible.
He advocated stoning gays, opposed women having the right to vote and was a white supremacist. None of these withstand analysis but they are repeated, believed and implicitly minimise the culpability of his murder.
And there have been examples of individuals excusing and even celebrating Kirk’s assassination. But we should be alert to the desire of social media to find the most objectionable posts and amplify them; creating the false impression that such a response was any more than a malign handful possibly chasing attention.
Using these few examples to define an entire political class is the mirror image of those who seek to denigrate Kirk’s reputation with false attribution.
There is force to the claim that we are in a period where social media is driving a partisan divide and the use of inflammatory language is escalating. Terms like racist, genocide, extremist and fascist are being used in ways that our grandparents would not have.
Much of this is hyperbole and language evolves, but if you take them at face value and accept that words are violence this can create an environment where acts of real violence become morally permissible.
And the path to de-escalation is found in a prophetic statement by Kirk: “where discourse ends, violence begins”.....The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
And then we have the alleged assassin. He seems ordinary. Unexceptional. Lacking the backstory of Lee Harvey Oswald or the cold stare of Timothy McVeigh. In the days between the crime and arrest we created a monster. Only to be presented with a child ensnared into an ideology that, between now and his possible execution, he may forgo.
Before he lays on the gurney I expect he will have returned to the person his parents raised him to be.
Like many I was aware of Kirk from his videos but had little understanding of his stature across the Pacific. Of his cultural power.
But this doesn’t explain the unsettling impact of his death. He held no office. Was not a celebrity in the traditional Hollywood sense. Kirk’s fame would not have been possible without social media.
By the time of his death he had become known to us through that medium. It was a parasocial relationship.
He was a character in the periphery of our lives. And then he was gone; and the nature of his death is unsettling. It was not illness, accident or the inevitable toll of age that took him from the arena.
Someone decided to kill him and we all saw it happen on the digital Colosseum that the internet has become. He was as alive as any of us have been in the moment his life was stolen.
His death confronts us with the fragility of our own mortality.
We look for meaning in the chaos. The ancients explained the capricious nature of existence by ascribing them to divine whims. The possibility that our lives are governed by a random walk of events is unbearable.
It means that the death of a child has as much moment to the universe as a pebble hitting a pond. And that we cannot accept. So we look for reasons. And when we look for answers we often find them; even if they do not exist.
There are two conflicting ideas struggling for ascendancy. One, that free speech is the ability to say whatever you wish short of inciting violence and two; words themselves can be violent. In this moment the issue being silently debated is that if words are violence then the use of force to stop them becomes permitted.
From what I have seen Kirk was a mainstream Christian conservative but he has been, and continues to be, demonised on questionable evidence.
Author Stephen King stumbled; claiming Kirk advocated stoning homosexuals. He didn’t. King honourably apologised. He was caught by a slew of misleading statements credited to Kirk that became ubiquitous in the hours after his death. At age just thirty-one.
I find it difficult to comprehend the mindset of people who have achieved far less over their much longer lives trolling through his content searching for fragments to take out of context.
There is mischief to this mischaracterisation. It contains a hint that his death was permissible.
He advocated stoning gays, opposed women having the right to vote and was a white supremacist. None of these withstand analysis but they are repeated, believed and implicitly minimise the culpability of his murder.
And there have been examples of individuals excusing and even celebrating Kirk’s assassination. But we should be alert to the desire of social media to find the most objectionable posts and amplify them; creating the false impression that such a response was any more than a malign handful possibly chasing attention.
Using these few examples to define an entire political class is the mirror image of those who seek to denigrate Kirk’s reputation with false attribution.
There is force to the claim that we are in a period where social media is driving a partisan divide and the use of inflammatory language is escalating. Terms like racist, genocide, extremist and fascist are being used in ways that our grandparents would not have.
Much of this is hyperbole and language evolves, but if you take them at face value and accept that words are violence this can create an environment where acts of real violence become morally permissible.
And the path to de-escalation is found in a prophetic statement by Kirk: “where discourse ends, violence begins”.....The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
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