Before I begin, I feel it is important to remind everyone that I am a pacifist, and have been for years. I would rather fall victim to violence than perpetuate it, and as a transgender woman this is a potential reality I have had to come to terms with.
I wish that our nation was different. The idea of living in a country where people can work together in good faith with others who are different than them so they could find a mutually beneficial solution is SUCH a wonderful aspiration.
However, America just isn’t that nation.
A human trafficker is president. Nearly half of all Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, and nearly a million are homeless. Political districts are openly being gerrymandered. Troops are marching in the streets of our country. We are funding a genocide against Palestinians. The government disregards the physical and mental health of its citizens while simultaneously granting unfettered access to firearms. Children dying in schools and worshippers dying in churches are accepted as the price of maintaining the political status quo. Politicians are assassinated in their homes and congressmen publicly mock their deaths. We, once again, have concentration camps. There are shameless calls for genocide against transgender people. I personally fled my home, family, and friends out of fear of political violence.
In my view, our nation is already in a civil war.
After Charlie Kirk’s death, some people have said that violence begets violence, and I agree. However, Kirk has made his career advocating for political violence; when he was shot he was talking about how dangerous transgender people are. This rhetoric IS VIOLENCE. This violence has not been properly condemned, and as a result it has practically been normalized. This normalization of violence is what ultimately led Kirk to get shot. If we truly wanted to stop the cycle, we would condemn all forms of violence, not just the tangible and visible ones.
I want to be the bigger person – to feel only compassion, to mourn alongside his family and those who witnessed his murder. However, Charlie Kirk was someone who openly advocated for the execution of people like me, so his death leaves me with deeply mixed emotions. Part of me feels that Charlie Kirk got what he was after – political violence – and his death carries a grim sense of karmic consequence. Another part of me feels relief that he can no longer spread and normalize violent rhetoric. However, the chief feeling I have is dread. His death will almost certainly be met with hollow “thoughts and prayers” on a nation-wide level, and there will continue to be no real policy changes to curb violence. Instead, it risks polarizing the nation even further, pushing a simmering civil war closer to open eruption. The bloodiest war in U.S. history was the first Civil War. A second would almost certainly eclipse it.
