Kyrie, eleison, I sang with my choir as I glanced down at my phone to see the news that Charlie Kirk had died from the gunshot to his neck. Lord, have mercy. Within seconds, I heard his name whispered from across the room as the news reached my choirmates.

The internet flooded with reactions to Kirk’s death. Every major news outlet ran the story of the murder, followed by hundreds of opinion pieces that unequivocally condemned the violence.

Many on the left also denounced the violence that ended Kirk’s life, employing it as a new case-in-point to advocate for stricter gun control. The less compassionate rejoiced in comment sections on TikTok and Instagram. I encountered dozens of responses where people listed Kirk’s now-infamous quote: “I think it’s worth [sic] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Is the implication that Kirk was asking for it? Sickening.

“Rest in hell,” said one comment I saw, followed by a flame emoji.

That is disturbing enough. But the news moves quickly and headlines keep breaking. The same day that Kirk died, a student opened fire at Evergreen High School in Colorado, injuring two students before making himself the final victim of the gunfire. Just days after Kirk’s death, another heartbreaking story broke about black college student Demartravion “Trey” Reed, who was found hanging from a tree on the Delta State University campus in Mississippi. A widely-circulated social media post, reposted by a number of my friends, reads:

Charlie Kirk is killed in public. The President of the United States announces his death. Mainstream media spends a week sanitizing his history of racism and bigotry.

A 21-year-old Black boy is found hanging from a tree at a predominantly white college in Mississippi and mainstream media does not even mention his name.

JUSTICE FOR TREY REED.

Reed’s death has since been ruled a suicide.

Meanwhile, a well-known podcaster said, “What does it say about us that the news of a conservative political activist getting assassinated may need to compete for coverage with yet another school shooting?”

It doesn’t end there. Kirk and George Floyd share the same birthday, Oct. 14, a day now ruled by Congress as a “National Day of Remembrance” for Kirk. “[N]ow we have two dead men whose lives were taken by the same system of violence, except one of them endorsed that system,” says a scathing article from Medium, which calls Kirk an “unapologetic bigot” right off the bat. 

In these snippets we see that hundreds of thousands of Americans are furious that the murder of Kirk – an undeniably controversial personality – was met with more outrage from the media than the murder of children. It seems we’ve reached a new stage of “whataboutism”: What about school shootings? What about George Floyd? What about Palestine? These are all variations of comments under every post paying homage to Kirk. Why do we care about him when horrific things are happening each day, perhaps to even more innocent people? 

The news has desensitized us to suffering. Even as mainstream outlets linger on the aftermath of Kirk’s death, public consciousness moves on from tragedies at astonishing speed, and we have decided that some murders are more lamentable than others. These tragedies are forced into conflict with one another as strangers on the internet – with no personal connection to the victims – debate which deaths are “worthy” of widespread media attention.

The verdict from the left? Kirk was not worthy.

Internet umpires insist that media coverage be directly proportional to the lamentability of the events it covers. Kirk’s death, while unfortunate, is not the ultimate tragedy to them. Fortunately for them, the news brings us new tragedies every day.

But this attempt to place all deaths on a sliding scale of tragedy – and truly every death is tragic – demonstrates, first and foremost, a lack of humanity. That news is sad, we might think, but this news is worse. Yet in doing this, we forget about the human beings whose lives are changed forever … including Kirk’s wife and young children.

Yet it is not for the living to decide which of the dead deserved what they got. It is not for us to pretend that new tragedies, new disasters cancel out the old ones.

What this phenomenon demonstrates, first and foremost, is the disregard for human life that has become so prevalent in our culture. It is all too easy to regard the loss of life as a tool to help or hinder a political agenda.

“Every human being, I believe, is made in the image of the Divine, is sacred, is unique,” Kirk once said. “And if we get away from this principle as we have, we not only have moral degradation, we not only have the collapsing society around us, but it’s bad for that being itself.”

Let’s draw our attention toward the person who becomes a victim of political violence. Let’s look at him as a human rather than a statistic. Let’s remember that every human life, politics notwithstanding, is irreplaceable.

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Image Credit: Negative Space