Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian
They will say it is too soon. (They are already saying it). They will say that instead of reflection there should be mourning. And there will be some (they are already among us) who will try to prescribe the form that this mourning should take. But the insistence on mourning is, of course, neither wholly sincere nor ideologically innocent. Mourning comes at a price—the price of averting our eyes from the viciousness of the life to focus only on the viciousness of the death of Charlie Kirk and of substituting the difficult but necessary activity of critical reflection for the easy and narcotizing comforts of conventional rituals. Mourning, in this way, is not how we remember but how we collectively agree to forget.
I will confess to having some of these thoughts while reading Trinity Today last Friday, where I learned that the flag on the main quad would be lowered to half-staff as a way of “honoring the memory of Charlie Kirk.” In this act of honoring Kirk’s memory what, I wondered, were we being asked to forget? Certainly the fact that Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, maintains a “Professor Watch List” that has been used to harass and to attempt to intimidate scholars across the country, a list on which two of our faculty appear. This alone should have given the College pause, but one would have also hoped that Trinity’s own mission statement would have preserved it from engaging in this humiliating public whitewashing of Kirk’s legacy. This decision was neither bold nor independent but shocking and servile. If that judgment sounds harsh, the fact that the College made no such announcement and took no such action to honor the life of slain Minnesota representative Melissa Hortman confirms that it is also just.
To pause and to reflect, rather than to submit automatically to the compulsion to mourn, might reveal hard truths about the state of our country and, let me be frank, about the ways in which we are failing many of our young men, truths that we would prefer not to face—about the monetization of fear and hatred in which Kirk trafficked and by which he profited and towards which, like the Pied Piper, he drew large numbers of young men whose lives he blighted. Above all, it might reveal to us our country’s persistent aversion to truth and its preference for a deep dishonesty, especially in moments of compulsory mourning, that it mistakes for decency.
I was barely aware of Charlie Kirk and still know next to nothing about TPUSA. Just not my thing. I too am mystified by the flags at half staff.
Yet I also believe that none of us is an island, and that we are all diminished by senseless death, whoever’s it is, and irrespective of their politics.
That my alma mater hires staff who choose to publicly express the sentiments expounded by this staff member is extremely disappointing.