“It is an attack on all of us,” Gov. Spenser Cox said about the assassination of Charlie Kirk during his press conference last Friday. “It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been, and who we could be in better times.”
Then, sounding like he was president instead of the governor of that state where it happened, he “desperately” called “on every American, Republican, Democrat, liberal, progressive, conservative, MAGA, all of us, to please, please, please follow what Charlie taught me.”
I wasn’t a fan of Kirk’s. Rather than explain why, I’ll refer interested readers to three articles published by The Dispatch.
Nick Catoggio describes Kirk’s best attributes alongside pointed criticisms and much more.
In “There Is No ‘They.’ Only ‘We,’” Jonah Goldberg reminds us that we are not at war with each other.
And in a Dispatch Faith piece titled “Reciting What’s True to Defuse a Politics of Hate,” Michael Reneau wrestles with how Kirk’s assassination “is a fresh reminder” of the frayed bonds within his Christian community.
What I want to do is focus on two of Kirk’s ideals that Cox said helped pull him back from the brink of despair.
“Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong,” Kirk said. “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive, welcome without judgment, love without condition, forgive without limit.”
Now, just as I understood why my mother wasn’t able to forgive the man who brutally assaulted her almost 20 years ago, I’m not asking anyone to forgive Kirk’s assassin.
As a lifelong devout Catholic, my mother struggled in a realm between the call to forgiveness and the reality of the lasting physical and psychological trauma she suffered. The last conversation we ever had about it began with the lack of genuine remorse her assailant showed during the trial and his sentencing.
That led to a discussion about restorative justice, in particular a story about a couple whose daughter was murdered by her boyfriend. Forgiveness helped the woman’s mother completely relinquish her “anger, hatred and the desire for retribution and revenge.” It freed her from being “stuck in that moment where this awful thing happened.” She called it an act of “self-preservation.”
My mother understood how genuine remorse and forgiveness were brought into the light by the uncommonly frank victim-offender dialogue they experienced through the restorative justice process.
The importance of dialogue is the other piece of Kirk’s wisdom that Cox spoke about.
“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” Sometimes, Kirk followed that statement with an ominous warning. “That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.”
Today, we Americans are good at talking to like-minded people. But we rarely ever attempt to engage with people holding very different viewpoints.
Kirk approached the problem by offering to debate anyone who disagreed with him. Although as Catoggio argues, “the style of debate he was known for was more about owning the libs in public than about working through policy disagreements.”
Watch many of those he had with college students, and you’ll recognize why his most of his challengers were easy prey. They weren’t well prepared to debate him.
This gets to my main point. Listening is an essential part of talking. As any courtroom lawyer or high school debater knows, you never win if don’t you respect your opponents enough to listen attentively to their arguments.
Or do the necessary research beforehand. To effectively debate policy issues in the public square with someone like Kirk, that means seeking out opinions that reside well beyond the confines of progressive information bubbles.
Everyone with a political opinion on anything should consider subscribing to podcasters with viewpoints that make you uncomfortable. Or, since reading is a form of listening, following writers who do. It’s a way to practice humanizing the political opposition who we too often casually dismiss as “they.”
It’s why, as an old school liberal, I’ve been a subscriber of The Dispatch since soon after it was founded. And I have to admit, it’s given me a profound lesson in humility.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
