This On That

 

 

You might have noticed that I've entered the "This Week's Picks" season of my blog.

This means that sometimes I don't write on a general topic, but instead give my goofy football picks. 

I missed writing about the recent unpleasantness, that is, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and its aftermath. 

I am a sixty-six-year-old man, and I knew of Charlie Kirk, but I hadn't watched any of his videos in which he debated our glorious generation of college students. I knew he was associated with Trump, but I didn't think too much of it and had no idea he was younger than my son.

Today's college students are bangers on iPhones, not so much on common sense. But college is a time when kids are exposed to "new ideas," and they don't want to hear any of the old ideas that have kept the world running for centuries, like marriage and having babies. 

Charlie Kirk was holding one of his campus "Prove Me Wrong" forums at Utah Valley University.  There was a crack of gunfire, and Kirk was gone.

I'm sure you saw a tape of the shooting.  It was gross and sickening.  

The sane response to this incident would be to recoil in horror. For the most part, people did. However, there is this insane portion of our society that feels it is their responsibility to Address The Nation via their favorite social media platform.

Really ugly X (Twitter) posts (Tweets) popped up, calling him all sorts of names without citing sources or giving context. 

My least favorite ones were on TikTok in which people who are slurping on an iced coffee in the front seat of their car letting you know Charlie Kirk was a (misogynist, racist, or any other "ist" promoting a sin ) and that he got what he deserved.

These social media posts was mean and nasty. They ought to be ashamed of themselves and maybe one day this will be.

The alleged killer was quickly found. It turns out he was living with his "lover," who is transitioning to becoming a female. His reasons for killing Kirk: "I had enough of his hatred. "Some hate can't be negotiated out."

So there you go.

This explanation from the killer has really bumfuzzled some people, particularly Jimmy Kimmel, who thought it was someone from the MAGA side of town. 

Kimmel said in his monologue (note: imagine Johnny Carson or Merv Griffin saying anything close to this in a monologue), "We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it."
 

That's a mighty rich sentence considering "the new lows" of characterizing the kid was a part of the MAGA gang was simply factual wrong. There's no indication he was a "groyper" (a really strange white supremacy group) and any other right wing faction.

Then Kimmel tried to score some political points of his own by showing some clips of Trump acting goofy when asked about the killing. Finally, Kimmel said, "This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish. Okay?”

I know Kimmel was trying to bust Trump's chops because let's face it, busting Trump's chops is fun.  But who is the goldfish in this analogy?  A living, breathing thirty-one-year-old man who was doing something controversial like talking into a microphone?

Unfortunately, Kimmel was suspended for this. I say unfortunately, because we have the First Amendment in this country, which protects the freedom of speech for all people, even the stupid ones like Jimmy Kimmel. This made Kimmel the poster boy for free speech, which is like making Chris Christie the poster boy for the President's Physical Fitness Test. 

Kimmel was allowed to do his show again. He came out and cried, which is his go-to emotion besides smugness. 

The Kimmel mess took our eye off the ball. We need to have a national conversation, and soon, about the way we treat our fellow man when they have a different point of view. If not, the next time will be worse.