It’s been a rough week.

This post isn’t going to be about city policy, so it won’t be going in the inboxes of my subscribers. What follows are entirely personal reflections about national events.

As everyone knows by this point, Charlie Kirk, a popular right-wing thought leader and organizer, was assassinated while publicly debating students on the campus of Utah Valley University. He was gruesomely shot in the neck in front of thousands of onlookers as well as many internet-connected cameras, which quickly shared graphic footage of the critical moment online for all to see.

We have since learned details about his alleged assassin and his life up to that point. Tyler James Robinson, a very bright 22-year old college dropout who had since enrolled in trade school, was living with and apparently dating Lance Twiggs, a young man of similar age who apparently was seeking to transition (or was in the process of transitioning) to living as a female. Robinson etched internet and video game memes onto the bullets used in the assassination. When, in a text exchange released by law enforcement, Twiggs asked Robinson “Why [did you do it]?”, Robinson allegedly responded, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated.”

To say that this incident — the victim, the context, the alleged perpetrator, the assumed motive — has rocked me to my core is an understatement. It feels different than other tragedies. To be clear it is not that the loss is more profound; a school shooting occurred at Evergreen High School in Colorado the same day that critically injured two students while the 16-year old gunman killed himself. How can we compare the devastation of the affected families and friends of that incident to the grief of Kirk’s mourners? Such things cannot fit on any scale we can imagine or contrive.

Rather, it is to say that this event feels like a “hinge” moment in our culture. Like other arresting events before it, it feels like I am being bodily dragged to the precipice of a profound moral choice. 9/11 forced us to confront the lengths we would go to secure ourselves and our desire for vengeance. The invasion of Iraq caused us question our righteousness. The freefall of our banking system at the start of the Great Financial Crisis made us wonder if it was right to spend the tax dollars of the many to save the livelihoods of the few, many of whom had profited from the outrageous risk-taking that caused so many to lose so much. And then there was COVID. How much freedom must be sacrificed, how much government control should be tolerated, in the face of an ever-shifting threat?

So what cliff are we peeking over now? As I peer into the darkness below, I fear this time the question is spiritual rather than ethical.

Do we really need each other, anymore?

Robinson clearly didn’t think so. “Some hate can’t be negotiated.” What finality there is in that statement! Robinson’s words reject the possibility of relationship, of discussion, of understanding. It also frames the world as a zero-sum game, where the interaction isn’t a joint effort at creating mutual prosperity and understanding, but a “negotiation” of which side gets what at the expense of the other. The mocking memes written on the bullets speak to a need not just to kill Kirk, but to spiritually obliterate him. They grimly echo the words scrawled by American soldiers on the atomic bombs that ended the last great war of annihilation: “Here’s to you!” “Lots of love!” “A second kiss for Hirohito!”

Contrast that with the banner hanging over Kirk’s Turning Point USA event: “Prove Me Wrong”. This statement presupposes connection and mutual dependence. “Prove” is a command to another human being to come closer, to address an issue frankly and logically, and to attempt to persuade. “Me” implies the speaker’s interest in having a personal relationship with that person. And “Wrong” suggests a posture of open-mindedness; it implicitly accepts the possibility that the speaker doesn’t monopolize the truth. Taken as a whole, the statement implies something even more profound: trust. You aren’t here to kill me. You are here to talk to me.

Now, did Kirk always show fidelity to this spirit? No. He didn’t. He slipped fluidly between his dual missions to grow an overtly political, 100% partisan voter mobilization organization and a civic-religious leader trying to lead by example. The first hat often clashed uncomfortably with the second. And equally, as much as we know about Kirk, we know next to nothing about Robinson. Who knows what his relationships were like.

So perhaps the contrast isn’t perfectly descriptive. But I do think it captures the cause of my deep feelings of foreboding these days. There are forces in the world –technological, economic, political — that are powerfully echoing Robinson’s dark message: we don’t need each other anymore, and we’d be better off if some of us were dead or gone. The internet and social media provide endless rabbit holes filled with compatriots that will affirm your every wish and desire, eliminating your need to justify yourself to your friends and family in the real world. AI and our tech-enabled lives let us consult with doctors that don’t exist and command robots to whisk whatever we can buy to our front door. Technology also increasingly threatens to render human labor obsolete. Whereas economic need previously forced Americans to grudgingly cope with migration, both foreign and domestic, maybe now we don’t have to.

And politically, there is a growing acceptance that there is some element — some group of people we are certain exist but that we can’t specifically name — in each camp that aren’t reachable. From the left’s perspective, they are the supremacists, the authoritarian aspirants, and the capitalist pigs. From the right’s, they are the woke dead-enders, the ANTIFA rioters, and the deep state loyalists.

These people, this dark thinking goes, can’t be persuaded, taught or convinced. They also can’t be tolerated. And there is an arrogant, almost god-like judgement buried in there, too: they can’t change. I’ve seen all ends, I know their hearts. They can only be eliminated. “I’ve had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated.”

Kirk, for all of his provocations, his deliberate antagonisms, his teasing, his playful mockery, and his jocular banter, bet his life on the proposition that this perspective was wrong. Yes, he devoted his time and energy to building a die-hard Trump political machine. But it was a political machine built on the promise of persuasion — that he could bring young people over to the conservative cause. This is what Ezra Klein meant when he wrote that Kirk “did politics the right way.” Kirk started from the proposition that anyone might come around to his way of thinking eventually. Maybe even a lost, angry, possibly depressed young man like Robinson.

And Robinson killed him for it.

What are we to make of this? Again, I feel the weight of a time for choosing. This time, it feels less like a policy choice we will make together than a path splitting in each of our own hearts. I confess I find myself leaning on my own religion to help me find the way. I believe, as Kirk did, that we are all made in the image of God, and that means that every one of us matters. My religion also commands me to love my neighbor as myself, which means we cannot abandon one another. We do need each other. Maybe more than ever before.

Kirk was right, and he died. It is now up to us to decide whether the belief he had in us, in this great experiment we are conducting together, died with him. And I’ll admit: that makes me afraid.