I was six the night that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was a Thursday, which I remember because “Bewitched” was on and I was sitting in my father’s lap. When the announcer came on and said that someone had been killed, I had no idea who he was. I somehow knew, though, that he was important because my father put me down, and he started crying.
That makes sense now, even though it didn’t at the time. Exactly a year before, my father had spent some months in Mississippi, registering Black voters and defending the indigent in the courts of Hattiesburg, Miss. Two steps forward, a hundred thousand back, with this murder.
Then, two months later, Bobby Kennedy was shot to death in Los Angeles. I still didn’t know what was going on, but it was my mother who burst into tears that time. While she ended her life as a strong Reagan-style conservative, Lucy Flowers was as enchanted by the Camelot Kennedys as any Italian Catholic married to an Irish Catholic in the 1960s.
And once, when we were paging through some old Life magazines, my grandmother told me that she had wanted to go and stand in line to pay her respects to President John F. Kennedy after he had been shot.
The 1960s were a time of dark struggles and violence, and political assassinations were common things. At least they weren’t rare, and we weren’t shocked when outspoken individuals were taken from us in the flash of a bullet.
Fortunately, I was too young to really grasp the gravity of those events, although I understand now how much of a mark they left on the generation before me.
As someone who entered her teen years in the 1970s and became an adult in the 80s, assassinations were a thing of the recent past, but still very much the past.
My boss of 30 years grew up in Italy during the days of the Red Brigade, what they call the “Anni di Piombo” or years of lead, so he had a slightly more informed view of political assassination. But as an American who had been relatively shielded from these crazy spurts of anarchy and terror, I looked away.
And then came 9/11, and all innocence was shattered. But even with that cataclysmic event, I wasn’t prepared to deal with political assassinations as a regular thing. And then, it started. Steve Scalise was almost murdered in D.C. while playing baseball with his congressional colleagues. Donald Trump was targeted, twice. Paul Pelosi found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Melissa Hortman was murdered in Minnesota. And then, on a clear Wednesday afternoon in Utah, on a college campus where people came to discuss ideas, Charlie Kirk, one of the most consequential young conservatives of his or any generation, is gunned down in cold blood.
As of this writing, his killer has not been caught.
You might say that Paul Pelosi and Charlie Kirk cannot be called “political assassinations” because neither served in office. But Pelosi was one degree removed from the most powerful woman in the country, his wife, Nancy. And for that matter, MLK was not elected to office, but his words moved mountains and the minds and hearts of politicians. By that same metric, so did Charlie Kirk.
There will be people who will recoil in horror that I would include King and Kirk in the same sentence, and that is because they are the sort of people who only value the opinions of those who agree with them. But believe me, give it a few years. Charlie Kirk will be mentioned in the same breath as the great political philosophers because his words and his methods were revolutionary.
And he was as brave as any of the Freedom Riders, because he was willing to get out into the crowds and speak to the people who hated him.
He countered that hatred with calm logic and an ability to persuade, if not entirely convince someone of his point of view. Kirk was a man of great faith, an evangelical in the best sense of that word, carrying his message to others with a clarity that most young people-he was only 31-often lack. He wasn’t angry. He was the proverbial Happy Warrior, doing battle with ideas instead of weapons, and winning on the battlefield of intellect.
For the generations he belonged to, Millennial and then X and then maybe even Alpha, he will be remembered for his success in bringing the message of self-determination, faith, and conservatism to people who are often brainwashed by progressive ideas in academe. Many of them don’t know any better, since being a liberal is a default in those communities. Charlie went into the lions’ den and tamed them.
Until someone with a bullet silenced him. But the bullets didn’t silence MLK, or JFK, or Bobby. They are still talked about in reverent tones, even though we now know just how human they truly were. Charlie will join that pantheon, far too prematurely, with the same amount of impact in his absence.
Most people don’t have a legacy at 31. But Charlie Kirk’s is an exceptional one.