The recent wave of politically motivated attacks in America compels us to fear. It also compels us to unite.
William Barbee
Contributor, The Buckley Beacon
As I exited my apartment last Wednesday afternoon, I felt the vibrations of dozens of cell phone notifications harangue me from my pocket. I decided to take a peek at these messages, thinking they would be from friends making jokes about this thing or the other. My assumption that the buzzes came from friends was correct; that they were making jokes, however, was not.
The news I received from my friends—that Turning Point USA co-founder and conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been shot and killed at a campus event in Utah—could not have come at a more pertinent time. I was actively on the way to a conversation with a group of Yale professors regarding the current state of higher education in America, an attempt for them to gauge input from students about solutions to the problems of mistrust and isolation at universities.
When I read the messages, articles, and news reports about what had happened, I immediately felt a spiritual nauseousness, as though God had manifested some cruel reminder of the importance of the work needed for universities to rebuild trust with the broader public. Examples like this, I thought, play directly into the narratives that allow for such a chasm to form between a society and its elites. I bore the burden of sharing the news with the group upon my arrival to the meeting. Their immediate reactions consisted of shock, remorse, and fear.
This last emotion, fear, has percolated within me since the tragic event of last Wednesday, as I imagine it has also percolated throughout the country at large. The fear of being shunned or ostracized for speaking one’s mind is one of the most deeply-rooted fears of a cultivated political civilization.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his Democracy in America that when a man dissents in a majoritarian democracy, he experiences “an existence incomparably worse than death.” Today, this existence worse than death has come to encompass actual death as well, with Kirk serving as an all-too stark reminder of that fact. A society that cannot tolerate differences of opinion inevitably tends towards violence, a violence which incites the worst kinds of fear within the hearts of men.
As the student president of the Buckley Program, an organization which hosts events with guests comparable to Kirk, I could not help but envision myself bearing witness to a similar situation as what unfolded in Utah. If it could happen there, I thought with a shudder, it could happen anywhere. Of course, these fearful sentiments do not arise randomly. They are the direct byproduct of events designed to induce fear, and the perpetrators of such events know it. Their power as purveyors of political violence stems mainly from the chaos they incite, as well as the consequent chilling effect. Silence one man with a big voice, and you silence a million others with his example.
Which is why I write to call for an abandonment of fear in exchange for an embracing of hope. Our greatest ability to exert change as witnesses to such heinous actions is not to cower in the face of evil. Rather, our power lies in our ability to come together as one people, united by a common respect for the lives and beliefs of others.
Over the past three years, my work and the work of my peers at the Buckley Institute has centered around proffering this hope in and around Yale’s campus, striving towards the cultivation of a university atmosphere where civility and openness are the norm. Time and again, events like that which unfolded last Wednesday prove the inherent value of our work while also showing how much ground remains uncovered. Whereas my emotional saga surrounding the death of Kirk began with fearful friends sharing the devastating news, it ended with those same friends standing side-by-side at a vigil hosted last Friday, where love and solidarity reigned supreme. Suffice it to say that faith can and will triumph over hatred—a message, I think, that Kirk would have supported, too.
We must never forget that the project of developing respect arises, ultimately, from a common sense of hope. The opportunity still remains from these trying circumstances to stand united as a community. It remains incumbent on all of us, then, to seize it.