Hi, friends. It’s been a minute. I’ve been sitting sick, which has given me ample time to reflect, not just on my health, but on the sickness in our society.
A few months ago, I wrote about the hate I was feeling from both the right and the left. I try my best to call a spade a spade when I see it. I’m sure I’m biased at times, I’m only human, but I truly strive to be fair in my criticism. I hope you’ll hear me through whatever hurt feelings we’re all carrying about where we are as a country. We only see the worst of each of our parties.
Violence Isn’t the Answer, But It Has Been the Pattern
Violence has marked so many major changes in our history. Pick almost any historical event and there’s probably violence attached to it. Change often came after conflict. But if we want to build something better, we have to change that cycle.
I’ll be so honest… I’m too soft for a civil war. But if it came to that, I’d offer my skills in administration and paperwork. (I have excellent references.) Sometimes I have to laugh to keep myself from crying, but I’m serious: if we don’t find another way, we’re in trouble.
Compassion Shouldn’t Be Partisan
Laughing at people when they’re hurting, whether after floods in Texas, wildfires in California, or even in political tragedies, may be your right, but it’s tacky. It doesn’t bring people to your table; it drives them away.
When we push people outside our house, they just congregate at the door, bouncing their ideas off each other. The result? Echo chambers. Democracy breaks. Nothing gets done, nothing makes either party happy, and we all suffer.
On Charlie Kirk’s Death and Legacy
Charlie Kirk was a polarizing figure. My friend, he was. He was not crucified by the left for having identified as Christian and Republican, but because he also built a platform that normalized racism, bigotry, and harassment. I would know, I am in these spaces much longer and deeper than you are. Through Turning Point USA, the organization placed professors and journalists on “watch lists” and fueled an environment where dissent was punished rather than debated.
That’s not free speech. That’s silencing.
You may grieve his life — and you should, because every life has worth, but not because he was a standup guy. We also must hold people accountable for the harm they caused. Just because someone shares your faith or your politics doesn’t automatically make them good. We shared this belief not that long ago with Westboro Baptist Church. We used to be equally horrified by their stance on humanity. My friend, I’m increasingly worried why we no longer can.
Humans are complex. Two truths can exist at once:
- We can admonish the manner this human being died by.
- We can also recognize that his legacy inflicted harm.
Martyrdom erases accountability. If you canonize him as a fallen hero, you whitewash years of division, cruelty, and misinformation. That’s not healthy for democracy. Here’s a very incomplete list of repugnant comments he espoused in his life.
Please do your best not to deflect and say those things are taken out of context. You are free to more deeply research this man’s words. I will not put more media out into the world promoting his idealology that I disagreed vehemently with.
Double Standards Burn Us All
After Charlie Kirk’s death, President Trump said:
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Friends, that’s partisan. Any other president, Republican or Democrat, would have called for unity and toned-down rhetoric. Instead, our nation’s president chose to weaponize grief and double down on his own harmful rhetoric.
And despite no evidence linking this assassin’s politcal affiliation to the left or right, the Republican administration continues to condone and direct harm to liberal groups and label them as “domestic terrorists”.
Those of us on the left are continuously called “evil,” “groomers,” “un-American,” “godless.” Our policies are painted as destroying the nation, even though most of us truly just want economic prosperity for the working class. Peaceful protesters are branded as violent radicals. Can you imagine how you would feel if the head of Democratic leadership spoke that way about you every single day?
That’s why so many of us are numb and angry. We’re told to speak with reverence for one side or the other, while both endure and lob constant attacks. Compassion is not partisan, and accountability shouldn’t be either. It should not be controversial to denounce the furtherst factions of our parties that embody the worst parts of our humanity and ideals, and yet…
On the far right, racism is excused or unrefuted and even women’s rights are threatened. On the far left, riots undermine the message of our peaceful protests. We must have the courage and grace to name these truths if we want democracy to survive when we are the in betweens of our parties. We must all be louder than the ones on the farthest extremes of our parties.
I know far more Democrats who think and feel like I do than the caricature that exists in the minds of the right. And in the same way, I know there are far more reasonable Republicans than the ones imagined by the left. Yet even I struggle not to fall into that far-side false dichotomy. We can’t let imaginary people overpower the real ones in our lives.
What We Must Learn
This man’s assassination reveals three valuable lessons:
- Violence must be condemned without creating martyrs. We can honor life without rewriting history.
- Compassion and accountability can co-exist. We can grieve losses of life while telling the truth.
- Double standards deepen division. Healing requires fairness, not selective outrage.
If the Republican Party leans into martyr-making instead of soul-searching and the Democratic Party leans into more ethics outrage, then we won’t just miss the lesson of this man’s murder, we’ll weaponize it. And that helps no one, not even our own voters.
A Call to Be Good Neighbors
We’ll never be at peace in our country if we can’t look in the mirror and tell the truth about ourselves to ourselves.
You don’t have to agree with my politics to agree that bigotry, racism, and misogyny are wrong, and to be clear, I think most people do believe that, regardless of their politics. You don’t have to like my political stance to treat me like a human being. I promise to do the same for you.
Let’s not use pain to harden our echo chambers. Let’s use it to soften our hearts. We can stand up together, demand better, and most importantly, be good neighbors to one another.
Respectfully, we all have a call coming from inside our own house that we could stand to answer and address. Are you ready to pick up the receiver?
Get involved. Attend your city council meetings. Go to your county party meetings. Go to your local school board meetings. Call your representatives. Remind them who votes them into office. They work for all of us. There is no short list of easy ways you can make a positive impact on your community.
Of course I want you on my team as a Democrat so we can build a better country and county together. But if we cannot agree, I hope we can still stand across the aisle and shake hands, working toward a brighter future instead of the darker one we currently face.
Little Blue Texans 
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