A time for healing, not revenge

Thoughts on 9–11, Charlie Kirk’s murder, and political violence

In the still­ness of a warm September night, a crowd stood qui­et­ly in front of the cour­t­house hold­ing light­ed candles. 

It was Sept. 12, 2001, one day after an unimag­in­able act of hor­ror, when Islamist ter­ror­ists had attacked New York City and Washington, D.C., using hijacked pas­sen­ger planes as guid­ed mis­siles and killing near­ly 3,000 civil­ians. The gath­er­ing in Nicholasville was a prayer vig­il involv­ing local faith com­mu­ni­ties, and the can­dles rep­re­sent­ed the light of hope.

That night, I heard no hate talk, only words of com­pas­sion and courage.

“As Americans and peo­ple of faith, we must rise above our suf­fer­ing and join togeth­er in sup­port of one anoth­er,” a Baptist min­is­ter urged.

A National Guard chap­lain prayed that what­ev­er mil­i­tary action must be tak­en would hap­pen “with the least loss of human life” possible.

Another preach­er said he had learned that a rel­a­tive of some­one in the crowd was a miss­ing FDNY fire­fight­er, and anoth­er urged prayers for that per­son and peo­ple in the audi­ence whose loved ones were in Washington or New York or strand­ed in airports.

There were even prayers for the hijack­ers whose minds had been poi­soned by ide­ol­o­gy so that they car­ried out bru­tal acts, believ­ing they were doing God’s will.

“Break us, so that we can love and show the way out of a world of hate and into your king­dom,” my Methodist pas­tor prayed.

The morn­ing before was bright and beau­ti­ful, and two of my cowork­ers and I were return­ing from a cham­ber of com­merce break­fast in Wilmore and jok­ing about not going back to the office. As we drove past hors­es graz­ing peace­ful­ly on this idyl­lic autumn morn­ing, I thought, or may have said, “every­thing is right with the world.”

Then, in a moment, every­thing changed.

We got a call from the office telling us a plane had crashed into one of the twin tow­ers of the World Trade Center. It must have been a small, sin­gle-prop plane with mechan­i­cal trou­ble or pilot error, we thought. Then anoth­er call. A sec­ond plane had hit the oth­er tower. 

DeAnna, an Army reservist, and I looked at each oth­er in con­fu­sion, and then in an instant, we under­stood. America was at war.

Shortly after, there was a report on the radio about the Pentagon being hit by an air­lin­er, and anoth­er plane crash­ing in a Pennsylvania field.

By the time we arrived at the office that Tuesday, the adren­a­line had kicked in, and we began scram­bling to find any local con­nec­tion we could to the biggest inter­na­tion­al sto­ry in many years.

We found a Jessamine County teacher who was relieved to learn that her cousin had escaped from the World Trade Center after the first crash. Another woman had learned that her niece, a CIA employ­ee, had been res­cued by a cowork­er at the Pentagon. 

But what touched me most deeply was an inter­view I did with an 18-year-old girl, Kristen Kuveikis, whose father, Thomas, was a New York fire­fight­er who had giv­en his life to save oth­ers. Every year at this time, I think of her loss. 

The say­ing is trite but true: The best way to hon­or the sac­ri­fices of 9–11 is to be the peo­ple we were on 9–12. And for a few years after the tragedy brought us togeth­er, what unit­ed us as Americans was greater than what divid­ed us. But that time is gone. 

As I sit down at my com­put­er to write this on Sept. 12, 2025, America is more deeply divid­ed than I can ever remember.

Half a cen­tu­ry after the achieve­ments of the civ­il rights era, racism is once again ram­pant. It is against the rules for gov­ern­ments and schools to pro­mote the virtues of diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion. Leaders are white­wash­ing the his­to­ry of slav­ery and seg­re­ga­tion. Human rights gains by peo­ple who expe­ri­ence same-sex attrac­tion and those who iden­ti­fy as a dif­fer­ent gen­der than the one they were born with are in dan­ger of being lost.

Although America has always been a nation of immi­grants, there is an epi­dem­ic of hos­til­i­ty toward migrants and refugees that is irra­tional and ugly.

And speak­ing of epi­demics, the coro­n­avirus tragedy that claimed a mil­lion American lives should have brought us togeth­er in a spir­it of patri­ot­ic self-sac­ri­fice as 9–11 did. Instead, it divid­ed us as many refused to fol­low com­mon­sense pub­lic health rules and feared vac­cines that had been shown to be safe and effec­tive in slow­ing the spread of the dis­ease and alle­vi­at­ing its debil­i­tat­ing effects.

In 2020, our coun­try was divid­ed by unfound­ed alle­ga­tions of vot­er fraud, and the pres­i­dent who spread the lie that the elec­tion was stolen incit­ed a riot that turned dead­ly as a mob of his fol­low­ers stormed the Capitol. One of his first acts after he was elect­ed pres­i­dent again last year was to par­don those who had assault­ed police offi­cers and trashed our tem­ple of democracy.

Democracy itself is threat­ened as there is a grow­ing ten­den­cy toward author­i­tar­i­an rule, not only in America but around the world.

Gerrymandered con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts that favor the most extreme par­ti­sans in pri­ma­ry races, and court deci­sions that pre­vent restric­tions on big mon­ey in cam­paigns, have polar­ized our pol­i­tics and made bipar­ti­san com­pro­mise all but impossible.

We can’t even agree on what is true any­more, as half of our peo­ple have turned away from reli­able, inde­pen­dent news orga­ni­za­tions and toward biased sources of infor­ma­tion and mis­in­for­ma­tion served with vit­ri­ol, ridicule, and contempt.

The day before the anniver­sary of 9–11, the coun­try was roiled by the assas­si­na­tion of Charlie Kirk, a young, far-right influ­encer who had mil­lions of fol­low­ers and was a ris­ing star in President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.

Kirk was a cul­ture war­rior. But more impor­tant­ly, he was a 31-year-old hus­band and father to two young chil­dren. He was an only child to his par­ents. He was a friend. He was an American cit­i­zen who had every right to be engaged in debat­ing social issues. He was some­one made in the image of God.

Regardless of what we think of his beliefs, all of us should mourn the sense­less death of this young man and grieve over the grow­ing sick­ness of polit­i­cal vio­lence that is infect­ing our society.

Kirk’s heinous mur­der has got­ten the most atten­tion, but it is one of many polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed vio­lent crimes that have occurred in the past year.

This sum­mer, Melissa Hortman, the for­mer leader of the Minnesota House, and her hus­band were mur­dered at home by a man who also shot and wound­ed anoth­er state leg­is­la­tor and his wife. Last month, a man protest­ing Covid-19 vac­cines fired 180 rounds at the Centers for Disease Control head­quar­ters and killed a police offi­cer. Another man tried to burn down Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home while he and his fam­i­ly were asleep inside. UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in a polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed crime. Two young Israeli embassy diplo­mats were killed at a recep­tion in Washington, D.C.

President Trump, who was him­self the tar­get of two assas­si­na­tion attempts last year, has tried to turn the killing of Kirk into a par­ti­san vendet­ta, vow­ing to go after “rad­i­cal left” activists and their fun­ders. But these acts have been per­pe­trat­ed by those on the right and the left.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a con­ser­v­a­tive Republican, has tried to turn down the heat. He called the killing of Kirk a “water­shed in American his­to­ry” that could be the begin­ning of a new chap­ter of vio­lence or the begin­ning of the end of the cur­rent chapter.

“This is our moment. Do we esca­late, or do we find an off-ramp?” he asked. “It’s a choice, and every one of us gets to make that choice.”

He’s right. We must look inside our­selves and ask, Is this who we real­ly are? 

The eyes of the world are on us. America can­not be a great nation unless it is a good nation. In this time of tri­al and trou­ble, let us appeal to what President Abraham Lincoln, in anoth­er time of great divi­sion, called the “bet­ter angels of our nature.”

Let us be more like the peo­ple we were on Sept. 12, 2001.