Yesterday, September 10th, a gunman shot and killed Charlie Kirk, a political activist known for inflammatory rhetoric, a disdain for empathy, and a verbally vicious manner. I will not bother to pretend that Charlie Kirk’s absence from American political life will cause me the slightest element of concern. He struck me as a petty, cruel man that monetized hate, and did little to nothing to actually make life better for people and actively made it worse for the targets of the hate from which he profited so generously.

I have sympathies for his children. It is never easy to lose a parent, and their tragedy is quite real. The majority of my sympathy is for the United States and the American people. Not because they are deprived of Charlie Kirk’s rancor and rabble rousing, as I have said I do not think in any manner that he was even within the same galaxy as the definition of a ‘good person,’ but the growing politically driven violence in our culture is a terrible infection that may have now grown beyond any quick and decisive treatment.

A few hours after the killing, writer Ezra KlEin posted a list of political violence this nation witnessed over the last few years with victims from both ends of the political spectrum. Political violence is an infection; in the absence of political antibiotics it grows and spreads eventually, if unchecked, becoming gangrenous.

I’m not going to spend time laying the blame to one faction or another. For the most part, persuasion has vanished from the political discourse and examples of hypocrisy or ill intent are only deployed now to burnish one’s own side or to soothe the feelings one might have because deep down they know theIR guilt lies there.

I do not mourn Charlie Kirk, but I do mourn our nation and what will be, I suspect, a long and painful road back to something like normalcy.