Quiet! Ye restless spirit that itches to jump into the fray. The bait is dangling right there — that foolish, ignorant, lying comment, that ridiculous meme just dying to be ridiculed, that — that thing that must not go unchallenged.
Quiet. What’s that expression, “Don’t feed the trolls”? One of the better memes out there says something like, “Life is too short to be spent arguing with strangers on the internet.”
But what if it’s no stranger? What if it’s a friend who posted something foolish, ignorant, or downright false? Now there’s a conundrum.
My humble advice is to pray. If you don’t believe in prayer, that’s another conversation, but for now, just contemplate and meditate on your friend’s words or deed. Then, check your facts. Is it really downright false? If so, speak the truth in love, gently. Is it really something worth risking a fight over? If so, speak the truth in love, gently.
And if you can’t do it gently, with sincere love, well, then …
Another one from the archives — this one written under my old nom de plume B.W. Richardson and preserved here and in my first collection,Refuse to be Afraid.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
My eye was caught at the antique store by a thick, well-worn book titled “Modern Medical Counselor.” By its condition it was clear the book was anything but modern, and the price ($2) was right, so, figuring it would be an interesting excursion into the past, I brought it home.
What actually caught my attention was the section that I casually opened to, even before I brought the book home: “Survival in Atomic Bombing.” The copyright date of the book is 1951, so browsing through this book will be a traipse through an era where communism and nuclear death were our greatest fears.
With the knowledge of what was to happen in the next 70 years, we know the fears were largely unfounded. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still the only cities ever destroyed by atomic bombs. Although the great communist bogeyman reared his ugly head many times over the years, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fell apart under the weight of its totalitarian follies and China has decided to try burying us the good old American way, by establishing government-subsidized monopolies.
In other words, the fear that was used as an excuse to impose on our liberties never came true. Communism and nuclear catastrophe did not destroy us.
Today, the fear is of small groups of terrorists (and “rogue nations”) with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. The fear is that an influenza virus that kills birds will find a way to migrate into humans and cause a pandemic. The fear is that standing too close to a person smoking a cigarette will give you cancer. We can let those fears control us, we can let others use those fears to justify locking us into cages, or we can refuse to be afraid and live our lives as free men and women.
Here is the fear that lurks behind all of these fears: We are afraid to die. We are especially afraid to die before we experience a ripe old age.
Here is the truth: We all will die, some of us “before our time.” The real choice we all have: We can live and die as slaves, or we can live and die as free men and women.
Most of our lives we exist in the gray area between freedom and slavery, convincing ourselves that we are making our choices freely: When we hand the chains to our government and our bosses and our creditors, we rationalize that we are making a free decision to enslave ourselves. And it usually is a freely made choice — in the beginning.
Like Jacob Marley’s ghost, we accumulate shackles as we progress through life, usually out of fear — fear of poverty, fear of going hungry, fear of not having a reliable car. And the biggest fear of them all is the fear of death.
Accepting that you will die is the beginning of freedom. The title of the song “Live Like You’re Dying” is its message.
These thoughts, especially as I relate them in a political context, could be misconstrued as advocating violent resistance against the slave masters. Nothing could be further from the truth. The revolution I advocate is an internal one:
Refuse to be afraid. Resist the impulse to yield to the fear and let someone strip your liberty in the name of security and protection. Live like you were dying — because you are dying, someday, so better to live free than in chains.
I’ve heard people say why are we so invested in this, there’s violence happening all across this country, and violence is tragic everywhere, and every life taken is a child of God who deserves our love and respect and dignity. This is certainly about the tragic death, assassination, political assassination of Charlie Kirk, but it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us. 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.
Political violence is different from any other type of violence for lots of different reasons. One, because in the very act that Charlie championed, of expression, that freedom of expression that is enshrined in our founding documents — in having his life taken in that very act makes it more difficult for people to feel like they can share their ideas, that they can speak freely. We will never be able to solve all of the other problems including the violence problem if people are worried about if we can’t have a clash of ideas, safely and securely, even especially, especially, those ideas with which you disagree. That’s why this matters so much.
Over the last 48 hours, I have been as angry as I have ever been, as sad as I have ever been, and as anger pushed me to the brink, it was actually Charlie’s words that pulled me back. I’d like to share some of those, and specifically right now if I could, I need to talk to the young people in our state, in my state, in our country. As President Trump reminded me, he said, “You know who really loved Charlie? The youth,” and he’s right. Young people loved Charlie, and young people hated Charlie, and Charlie went into those places anyway, and these are the words that have helped me.
Charlie said, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” He said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. Welcome without judgment, love without condition, forgive without limit.” He said, “Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.”
A few months ago — I referenced this last night — Charlie posted on social media, “When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it’s important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read Scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It’s going to be OK.” He again said, “When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to commit violence.” He said, “What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable agreement where violence is not an option.”
Now, again, to my young friends out there, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage. It feels like rage is the only option. But through those words we have a reminder that we can choose a different path. Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now — not by pretending differences don’t matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.
I think we need more moral clarity right now. I hear all the time that words are violence. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. And there is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable. Yet all of us have an opportunity right now to do something different.
I want to thank my fellow Utahans. You know, bad stuff happens, and for 33 hours I was praying that if this had to happen here, that it wouldn’t be one of us, that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country. Sadly that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for — just because I thought it would make it easier on us if we could just say, “Hey, we don’t do that here.” And indeed, Utah is a special place. We lead the nation in charitable giving, we lead the nation in service every year. But it did happen here, and it was one of us.
But I want you to look at how Utahans reacted the last two nights. There was no rioting, there was no looting, there were no cars set on fire, there was no violence. There were vigils and prayers and people coming together to share the humanity — and that, ladies and gentlemen, I believe is the answer to this. We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — it metastisizes, because we can always point the finger at the other side, and at some point we have to find an off-ramp to it’s going to get much, much worse. These are choices that we can make.
History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country, but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us. We get to make decisions; we have our agency. And I desperately call on every American — Republican, Democrat, liberal, progressive, conservative, MAGA, all of us — to please, please, please, follow what Charlie taught me.
I’ll just conclude with words I share often from a friend, an author, Yuval Levin, who was asked if he was optimistic about our country. He said, “I’m not optimistic. I hate optimism.” God, that sounds bad, but he said, “Optimism is a vice. It’s this idea that good things are just going to happen. In the history of the world, good things have never just happened. I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful, and hope is the virtue that sits between the vices of optimism and pessimism. Hope is the idea that good things are going to happen because we can make them so.”
I still believe in our country, and I know Charlie Kirk believed in our country. I still believe that there is more good among us than evil. And I still believe that we can change the course of history. I’m hopeful because Americans can make it so.
