The Price We Pay

Yet more families woke up to a nightmare this week. The high-profile murder of Charlie Kirk is foremost on my mind. As someone who lost my own father before I was a year old, I have a sense of what this means for the young mother and kids who have been left in the wake. My circumstances were different, though. My dad died of cancer. This family will have to come to terms with a violence that has completely shattered their lives.

It’s difficult to read the commentary dominating social media; anger, sarcasm, and meanness do not help in a volatile climate. Yes, Kirk was a polarizing figure, but at the end of the day, this is no cause for celebration or pointing to karma or casting blame. There’s never an excuse for shooting up classrooms, movie theaters, nightclubs, churches, or gunning down people we disagree with.

Seriously, America, where do we live? Why do we keep putting up with this?

And just so this story is not lost, let’s remember that other families also woke up to a nightmare this week. There was another school shooting on the same day at Evergreen High School in Colorado. It has been hard to get information since the Kirk story is dominating the headlines. As of this writing, two students still remain in critical condition. The 16-year-old shooter is dead. According to Jacki Kelly, spokesperson for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, the shooter “was radicalized by some extremist network.” (USAToday 11 Sept. 2025)

As Trump said in an address to the nation, "It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible," Coming from a man who has built his entire presidency on demonizing others, this statement is both ironic but exactly true. It is the central problem we face.

Mixing unregulated firearms and hateful, politicized rhetoric is the perilous combination we’ve allowed to take over our country. The cost affects all of us:

• Our children are not safe in their schools. Remember the young children who have died violently: Columbine High School (13 students, 1 adult), Sante Fe High School (10 students), Sandy Hook Elementary (20 children, 6 adults), Robb Elementary (19 children, 2 adults), just to name a few.

• For every school shooting, we forget that the parents of the shooter have to come to terms with the death of their own child as well as the fact that he murdered others.

• Some churches now have armed guards on Sunday mornings. Others are creating crisis plans and locking the doors after services start.

• Private schools are running capital campaigns to pay for – not for textbooks, athletic fields, or computers – but things like bullet-proof glass for the doors and safety cameras.

• As this week unfolds, we surely realize it is no longer safe to exercise our freedom of speech in public spaces.

• All over this country, families are waking up without their children, or their fathers, or their mothers.

None of this sounds like freedom or a reasonable price to pay.

The problem is that we imagine it will always be someone else. None of us imagine that the price will be our children in their schools. Charlie Kirk didn’t imagine that the price would be his own life. But here we still are, sorting through the rubble again.

The hatred we have toward each other exacts a high cost for all of us, and that’s what has to change. Theophilus of Antioch, a second-century bishop, wrote, “Say to those that hate and curse you, ‘You are our brothers!’” That seems to be the only way to move ahead. We must look to the other side and imagine them – not as the enemy – but as our fellow brothers and sisters (flawed as they are).

Many people (including me) were not fans of Charlie Kirk, but shooting him wasn’t the answer. And whether you liked him or not, we have only one way forward: to remind ourselves that Charlie Kirk was our brother.

I’m going to try really hard to embrace the words of Theophilus of Antioch. Hope you’ll join me.