Talking is not enough

Charlie Kirk was assassinated and Iryna Zarutska was murdered. The footage is grotesque and shocking. The aftermath is painful. There is very little to say about these tragedies that has not already been said. Polarization and political violence have been pressing issues for years, capturing and retaining the attention of all those who dare discuss American politics. Organizations like BridgeUSA and Braver Angels have long led the effort to depolarize our nation.

America has been popularly diagnosed with a deteriorating ability to talk across the aisle and, consequently, the solution is framed as talking across the aisle more. And yet, this is what Charlie Kirk was killed for doing. Do we really need another conversation? I do not say this to make the effort seem hopeless, nor to devalue productive discussion, but to take the solution a step further.

While violence as a result of political polarization is an inherently political issue, the solution does not have to be a political solution. We chase after the golden ideal of working together despite varying political beliefs, but we stop there. We end up satisfied with the pretty rhetoric of our idyllic solution and smugly decide we are more politically mature than others because we can hold a basic conversation. After all, it is the nature of the individual to believe that they are the exception — that they must not be part of the problem. 

By championing the aesthetic ideal of bipartisan collaboration, we do not go far enough. We stop short of acknowledging others’ inherent value as children of God and loving them as such. Instead, we shy away from the enormous difficulty of this task by assigning to ourselves the duty of merely looking past the artificial groupings of political parties. We tell ourselves that if we can have a conversation, if we can simply tolerate one another, we are doing enough. It is not that bipartisan collaboration is not important, it is that we are too weak to push ourselves further past it to address the root of the issue. 

What we have diagnosed as a national issue is an individual one. This is not an elaborate societal issue. This is a loss of fundamental values and morals on the individual scale. There is little that can be done on a national scale if individuals have not first extensively reexamined themselves. America cannot heal until it identifies the wound. Thus far, we have only been identifying symptoms, briefly hinting at the real issue along the way. 

We have reduced each other down to what we say and what we do, rather than the fact that we are. Our mere existence is proof of God’s love and our value in Him.

There also arises the issue of what we think we deserve. Especially in recent years, there has been a growing trend of entitlement that extends far past what we really do deserve. We are not entitled to silence people or things that offend us. We are not entitled to infringe on the rights of others. We have begun to expect that others should do for us what we would not do for them. It has become increasingly apparent that we want to be loved without the sacrifice of loving. 

But do not make the mistake of equating “loving” or “valuing” someone as a child of God to passive acceptance of what they may be wrongfully choosing. Love is often far tougher than we would like it to be. 

Disagreement is difficult, and loving a neighbor you disagree with is harder. At the University of Notre Dame, we are offered a daily reminder of our identity as children of God. We have a unique opportunity to take the values embodied here and to live them out wherever we may go, serving as an example for those who do not have the same privilege. We are blessed to have been given such a weighty responsibility.