Friday was the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001. Thursday was the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. On Friday, Townhall posted an article about the truth that those two events have in common.
The article reports:
Both tragedies confront us with the same fundamental truth: Evil seeks to silence, terrorize and destroy. The Bible puts it even more personally, identifying evil with a name: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” And a free society cannot survive if we lose the moral clarity to recognize that thief and the courage to resist him.
Those of us old enough to remember September 11, 2001, remember more than where we were when the planes struck. We remember the moral clarity that followed.
We knew innocent people had been murdered. We knew firefighters running into the towers were heroes. We knew passengers aboard Flight 93 sacrificed themselves to save strangers. We knew the terrorists who deliberately targeted civilians were evil.
Americans argued later—and rightly so—about wars, intelligence failures, foreign policy and the proper limits of government power. But on that morning, no serious person suggested that the victims somehow deserved what happened because of their politics, careers, religion or perceived privilege. We did not comb through their histories looking for reasons to withhold sympathy. We did not demand ideological agreement before mourning the dead.
They were Americans. They were human beings made in the image of God. They were innocent. That was enough.
Twenty-four years later, Charlie Kirk was murdered while doing something distinctly American and profoundly Christian: standing in a public forum, inviting questions and debating people who disagreed with him.
Unfortunately, today we have American politicians saying that we deserved the events of September 11.
The article notes:
We have replaced political opposition with moral dehumanization. People are no longer merely wrong; they are dangerous. They are not neighbors to be persuaded but threats to be eliminated. Once that premise is accepted, violence becomes easier to excuse. If someone’s speech is itself characterized as violence, then actual violence against him can be repackaged as self-defense.
That is how a culture prepares itself to tolerate political bloodshed.
The article states:
What we believe as a society matters.
We can teach that speech is answered with speech, that freedom begets liberty, that political opponents retain their God-given dignity and that courage means standing for truth without surrendering to hatred.
Or we can teach that empathy is tribal, violence is negotiable, and murder becomes understandable when the victim holds the wrong opinions or the murderer is sympathetic and we cannot judge.
The choice is up to us.
