Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Shows How Far We’ve Fallen

Charlie Kirk was assassinated this week. A man with a microphone in his hand and an audience in front of him was cut down mid-sentence. Whatever you thought of him, the shock should have stopped us cold. Instead, before the echoes of the gunshot faded, too many people sprinted for their political jerseys.

If you are cheering for this man’s death, you have lost your humanity. A man is dead. Whatever you thought about his politics, he was a son, a friend, a neighbor to someone. If your first reaction is to celebrate, you’ve let politics devour the part of you that makes you human.

If you are trying to make a political issue out of this, you have lost your soul. We live in a country where grief barely gets a moment of silence before someone finds a way to spin it into campaign material. When a body is still warm and the first instinct is “How does this help my side?”—something deep inside us is broken.

If you see people who disagree with you as evil, you have lost your ability to love. Disagreement is not damnation. But the louder the shouting gets, the more we seem to forget that. Neighbors aren’t demons. They’re people. They cut their grass, they buy groceries, they love their kids. And so do you.

If you were hoping the shooter was on the other side of the political spectrum from you, you have traded your humanity for politics. That reflex—hoping tragedy falls neatly into your preferred narrative—isn’t strategy. It’s sickness.

And make no mistake, this is exactly what power structures love. A divided house is easy to control. The longer we see each other as enemies, the safer the powerful and the greedy remain at the top. They keep their grip because we’re too busy tearing at each other to notice who’s really pulling the strings.

But here’s the truth we keep forgetting. We actually want the same things. We all want affordable groceries that don’t drain the paycheck. We all want safe neighborhoods where kids can play without fear. We all want schools where the biggest worry is homework, not lockdowns. We all want to go to work, make enough to cover the bills, and still have a little left for a Friday night pizza.

Think about that. When the waitress refills your coffee, you don’t stop to ask her views on gun control. When the owner of the diner unlocks the doors at dawn, nobody wonders about his opinion on tariffs. When your pastor prays with you after a hard week, you don’t ask him where he stands on farm subsidies. When your doctor walks into the exam room, you don’t care what box he checks at the ballot— you care that he knows how to heal. Real life is built on neighbors and community, not political positions. It’s about the people who show up for you and the people you show up for.

And if we ever remembered that, if we ever came together, we could make the world a better place. And that is exactly what the wealthy and powerful fear—not left, not right, but people who finally realize they’re on the same side and are being hindered not by each other but by power structures that benefit the powerful by keeping them divided.

Charlie Kirk’s death is a tragedy. But if our only response is to cheer or to weaponize it, then the bullet didn’t just kill him—it ripped through our shared humanity.

We are neighbors before we are members of a political party. Americans before we are partisans. Humans before we are hashtags.

And if we can’t remember that, maybe we were never as free as we thought.