washing dishes: a father’s glimpses

There’s been a lot of ink spilled written about the assassination of Charlie Kirk on Wednesday in Utah. The immediate reactions that were it was a radical leftist, possibly a liberal. I didn’t agree with that immediate hypothesis or rush to judgment. One conclusion that I did rush to was that the shooter was a man.

I’ve been in a few conversations in the last 3 days where the shooting, and its reverberations in the news cycle, in the realm of politics, has circulated quickly. A small number of corporate media channels flatten of our collective consciousness based on what pervades 15 minutes of fame or infamy. Just for right now. So, some part of me cringes at directing more attention to it, even if the intriguing writing is longform, my preferred news format, by cutting, pasting, and linking to Adam Wren’s interview with Hasan Piker in Politico where some of Piker’s answers are:

• “And as a part of my profession, I see a lot of horrible images in general, throughout global conflict. I think seeing someone who I know — not someone I’m fond of but still, someone that I’ve known for years, someone I’ve debated before, someone that I was supposed to be debating in two weeks, someone who I guess is in the same field as myself, someone who does basically what I do, but on the right — that is the one fear that’s always in the back of your mind when you engage in any sort of political advocacy when you do these events.”
• “I was supposed to be sitting next to this guy two weeks from now at a public event. I’ll just probably wait it out, but at a certain point, you can’t let fear dictate your life.”
• “I think political violence has become more of a forefront in our discourse, in our generation’s discourse, more so than ever before. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I have recency bias. But I don’t remember any point in the past decade of my career where it was this transparent, it was this out there, it was celebrated to this degree.”
• “It’s seen as a pressure valve for people. Democracy is supposed to be a pressure valve. So when the democratic institutions are not working to meet the demands of the overall population, there’s a lot of discontent. And then I think people find themselves in the throes of desperation, find themselves so angry that they can’t deal with it, that they end up engaging in adventurism, decentralized violence such as this. And I think that’s where these instances of political violence and instability come from.”
• “Getting a couple dunks in the process. That’s a big part of the debate culture. Having said that, it still can be productive. There are still people who can have their minds changed in that process, where they go “Wow, my worldview that I took for granted is maybe seemingly not so smart.””
• “I think, if left unaddressed, a lot of these societal wounds are not going to heal.”
• “I don’t think it’s necessarily about getting together and singing Kumbaya. I don’t think that’s the way to solve it.
• There’s a social contract that everyone abides by. When they consistently feel like that social contract is getting violated with regular frequency, oftentimes due to the structural violence that they experience — poverty, things of that nature, the affordability crisis that people are experiencing, housing is incredibly costly, health care is incredibly costly…. Everything seems worse than it was for the previous generation.”
• “I think the reason for that is because we’ve just become more vicious.”
• “I know this from my own personal experiences as well. I know that if I were to be assassinated in a similar fashion, the right would erupt in joy, probably even more loudly than what some liberals may be experiencing. I think that’s just how it is now. We are very polarized, and in some ways that polarization is understandable.”
• “A big part of that is we have also become desensitized, utterly desensitized, to violence in general — both as a byproduct of our foreign policy around the globe, but also because of how violent America has become.”
• “But I do understand, even if I myself don’t partake in it, where this resentment comes from.”
• “And going out in public, I think, is the perfect antidote to the vicious nature of the internet.”

As is always true, there is a lot happening here simultaneously, just as there was on Wednesday. The internet presents the onslaught of how much is out there, making it more available to us while also subjecting us to more. Anxiety is more pervasive due to the greater levels of awareness. But more anxiety isn’t helpful, it’s stifling and suffocating. The best way to relent is to reject how much information we take in. Spencer Cox, Utah’s governor, used the metaphor that social media is a cancer. There’s a lot for us to refuse and reject for the sake of health and happiness to contribute to a future that is better, not just less bleak, than today.