How do you respond when a famous person whose ideology you abhor is shot and killed?

The same way you respond to every death in a world too full of it

I’m writing this the evening after Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative activist, was shot and killed at a college in Utah. I do so in the early hours of what I imagine is going to be an absolutely turgid discursive cycle— about his death, sort of, but more about how various people are or aren’t talking about his death.

That’s what’s in the air right now, but I’m not writing primarily about Kirk, nor what others should or shouldn’t say about him.

I’m writing tonight because there are words echoing in my head, a line that I return to frequently, from the abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore. “Where life is precious, life is precious.”

I’m writing, as I’m always writing, because ours is not a world where life is currently precious, where we do everything we possibly can to prevent any human being’s life from ending too soon, where we place an equal degree of meaning and dignity on all of our lives.

Ours is a world where deaths are deemed allowable or even inevitable if there is money to be made or political fortunes to be advanced or systems of power to be solidified. It is a world where careers are made (including Kirk’s) on dehumanizing entire groups of people, which is to say where careers are made on wishing death on entire groups of people.

Ours is a world that is awash in guns and other tools of death (everywhere, but in one country in particular). I know that Kirk had plenty of opinions about those guns, ones that he expressed up to his literal last moments. If only the problem was as simple as one man’s rhetoric.

Ours is a world where some deaths are mourned publicly and others are never acknowledged. It is a world where some places experience unnecessary death as disruptive anomalies and others where death never stops. It is a world where some deaths are deemed worthy of retribution, where tonight I fear what is to come (be it from individual vigilantes out for blood, a strongman eager to create more distractions, from a state that does this all the time).

Life is not precious in our world. If it were, we would not disappear human beings and pretend that doing so solves social problems. If it were, we would not rest until everybody was fed and clothed and housed and loved. If it were, we would not be so skittish at naming the patterns of caste and exclusion that still define our lives. If it were, we would not coronate the people we do, reward the behavior we reward, applaud any work that draws us further away rather than closer together.

I hope that you respond to the famous conservative activist being shot the same way you have long been responding to a world where the best thing about life— that we get to do it with each other— has been so thoroughly obscured and degraded. I hope that yesterday and today and tomorrow you are awed by life, by the fact that we are given a certain amount of time to care deeply for one another. I hope you remember that it is a tragedy to squander any of that time feeding the systemic machinery of death. I hope that you are showing love in direct ways— to your neighbors, to the people in your immediate circle, to people you once harmed. I hope that you are showing even more love through the politics you practice and the movements you build. And I hope, with an increased sense of urgency, that you show love by standing in the breach against those who preach the gospel of blood and power.

I hope that was true when the headlines were about children dead at school. I hope that was true when the headlines were about Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota. I hope that was true when the headlines were about families in countries far from where you live. I hope that was true when there were no headlines. And I hope that is true tonight.

Life, in this world, is not yet precious. And so we keep killing each other. But there is no law that makes that inevitable. Human beings built these systems of death. And so too can we build webs of life.

Also: Thanks for being here, you all. I already shared a bunch of announcements in Tuesday’s public essay, so feel free to check it out if you haven’t (scroll to the bottom for all that business).