Battle Ground resident Silas Matson shares the ‘sudden whiplash of emotions’ he experienced after Charlie Kirk’s murder

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com

Last Wednesday I went with my wife to get an ultrasound, and learned that my firstborn child will be a daughter. Words cannot express my joy and hope for the future. In those moments, seeing those tiny arms and legs moving on the screen, everything I worried about day to day seemed less important. Life’s challenges felt suddenly surmountable with so precious a gift to care for. My wife tells me this girl’s gonna have me wrapped around her finger, and that seems a fate worth embracing.

Then, in that same hour, I learned that Charlie Kirk had been murdered. A man the same age as me, 31. A man with two young children, who will now grow up without a father. I do not think I have ever experienced such a sudden whiplash of emotions in my life.

As I grappled with this melange of emotions that afternoon, I was reminded of an article I’d read earlier that same day: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/

The author, Scott Alexander, explores the theme of tolerance in American Society, and makes the argument that we do not have a coherent understanding of tolerance and forgiveness. He argues that what we consider tolerance is self-aggrandizing. When we consider something truly wrong, or evil, we do not tolerate it, nor do we consider it a virtue to do so. And the things we pride ourselves on tolerating are rarely things we actually believe are wrong, so there’s no sacrifice in it.

In Alexander’s article, he states that what we truly can’t tolerate is the outgroup, which are the people most like us, but across the political/cultural divide. When framed this way, America’s left-right polarization looks more and more like tribal balkanization. Both left and right increasingly see each other not just as wrong, but as inherently evil. Because of this, we want to not only blame the perpetrators of violence, but anyone also on “their side”, whatever side that may be.

Saying violence is “the other side’s fault” is itself outgroup logic, blinding us to our own culpability in the downward spiral. The reality of who is at fault for political violence is more complicated.

So why do we see the “other side” as evil? Because what we see isn’t representative, but the amplified voices of the most inflammatory and unbalanced. We are addicted to the outrage machine, so we click and share the outrageous, which makes money for the pundits, who run to where the money is, and so the cycle continues, until the most mentally unstable and disaffected among us start seeing themselves as justified in taking up arms against the irredeemable evil and committing violence.

Then, horrified, we look to social media, to political pundits, to the other side to see who’s to blame. And what do we find? The outrage machine, eager to tell us more of what we already believe, that the other side is evil. And they have evidence! Thousands of social media posts, statements by pundits and politicians we dislike, and again we miss that it’s always the worst voices amplified for clicks and money. We become useful idiots in our own destruction. It’s a terrible feedback loop: the more outrageous we think “they” are, the more justified violence feels, and there will always be another person just off their rocker enough to act on it.

The founders of our country were not naive. They understood well the tribalistic nature of man, and that there would always be divides that seemed (or even are) intractable. This is the reason a founding principle of America is resolving disputes through law and ballots, not violence. They understood that violence begets violence, and once unleashed, it spirals into misery beyond imagining. This is the line we cannot cross, and still we are crossing it.

So when I learned of Charlie Kirk’s murder a scant few minutes after seeing my daughter on that ultrasound screen, I realized I had a glimpse into the personal profundity of the tragedy. A man who surely felt as I did when first seeing his own children on that ultrasound screen is gone forever, a victim of our appetite for outrage and scapegoating.

Just as it was my sin that held Christ to the cross, it is my self-righteous certainty that “the other side” is to blame for society’s ills that helped murder Charlie Kirk. May God have mercy.

Silas Matson
Battle Ground

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