The blog is a few days early this week in remembrance of Charlie Kirk who died one year ago today as well as in remembrance of the death of about 3000 Americans 25 years ago, tomorrow, at the twin towers in New York.
Charlie Kirk was a man who thought engaging verbally with people as often as possible, even those who might not believe as he did, to high light the greatness of our country and God was a good thing. Unfortunately, he died because some people disagreed with him and thought the only way to engage with those who believed as he did was to kill them. This method of engagement, killing people who don’t agree with you, is the opposite of what Charlie Kirk evidently believed in. Hitler killed people who did not agree with him, Stalin killed people who did not agree with him and in first century Palestine religious leaders killed someone else, a young rabbi named Jesus Christ, who tried to bring peace and happiness to people but disagreed with those religious leaders. He tried to show that their religion was created to show men how to treat each other and be happy in this world and the world to come. Unfortunately, Thousands died in the young rabbi’s movement for about 300 years at which time it brought great new things to the world like hospitals, orphanages, colleges (though the first colleges were started in Arab countries but did not expand to a network as was the case in Christianity) and schools for young children, bringing civilizing influences and literacy to the modern world.
Charlie Kirk tried to, in my opinion, expose the common sense of his viewpoint to others to try to defuse the violence that was building up in the United States that eventually resulted in his death. Hopefully, he reminded us that we must always try to establish a dialog to enable people to see peace and love of your fellow countrymen, is preferable to a society that strives to silence people who do not share their beliefs by killing them. The reason our country is so great, in my opinion, is conflicting views and ideas can compete, peacefully to bring about better views, beliefs and inventions. When we look at the writings of the founders of the United States of America and why they constructed our government and constitution the way they did, we see there were many competing ideas discussed but they worked together to craft a government that was fair to all and that would be flexible enough to change as technology changed and new ideas were formed in the future.
But switching to an even more somber note, from 9/11 we see what can happen when a group of people think that violence is the answer. On 9/11 America lost about 3,000 people and another 1,900 soldiers in the subsequent war but the enemy lost over3.7 million, three orders of magnitude more than America did. Surprise attacks on America, as in this case, has always been a very bad idea. Enemies who attack another country first, for the purposes of getting more land or more power rarely succeed (as in WWII) in winning though some times in making no gains (as in the Korean conflict) in this day and age.
Except in the case of an unstable power trying to attain a nuclear capability, attacking another country should always be an action of last resort. As for killing another citizen of your country simply because you disagree with him or her, that is something that should never happen, especially in a supposedly civilized nation such as the United States. There must be peaceful coexistence for all ideas in the Unted States.