A great deal of evil in the world can be described (and has been described) as banal. It happens constantly — often without us realizing it, without thrusting itself in our faces, and without making its perpetrators known to the world. Think of the routine executions that are conducted by the anonymous butchers working on behalf of Planned Parenthood, or MAID clinics in Canada. Think of the many fraud schemes that are currently being hatched by unknown Somalis in Minneapolis, or the crimes against humanity that are taking place, as we speak, in far-off African countries. These are all horrific acts. But we also don’t see them happening. We just know that they happen. And they happen so often that, to a certain extent, we take them for granted. And therefore, whether we realize it or not, we can discuss these acts of evil with a certain clarity and calm.
The brutal murder of Charlie Kirk was not a banal act of evil. There was nothing routine or mundane about it. Footage of Charlie’s public execution was beamed to hundreds of millions of people across the world. His death was far more gruesome than any depiction in a film could ever be. And it was streamed in far higher-resolution than any other documented political assassination in the history of this country. Outside of military veterans — many of whom suffer for the rest of their lives because of what they’ve seen on the battlefield — it’s highly unlikely that any of us had ever witnessed the devastating and immediate effects of a sniper shot to a man’s neck. I know that I had never seen such a thing. And I certainly had not seen it happen to a friend. But whether you were a friend of Charlie or not — whether you agreed with his politics or not — the point is that you had never seen anything like this event. On September 10th, that changed. And what you saw, if you have a conscience at all, changed you.
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