On Sept. 10, conservative activist Charlie Kirk, 31, was shot and killed during a speaking event in Utah. He leaves behind a wife and two very young children. Assassination is a tragedy for our country and for humanity. In this case it raises the flame beneath a pot that had already been simmering and is now dangerously close to boiling over. We must pray for peace, and for a reckoning that rids us of senseless violence once and for all.
His death came as the nation was already reeling from news of another violent death. On Aug. 22 you did not hear of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska. That’s the day she was murdered while quietly riding on the Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail system and scrolling on her smartphone.
Her death by the hand of a violent, mentally ill man with a long rapsheet went unreported by mainstream media for weeks, until security footage — unwatchable, brutal footage — was slipped into social media, and people started asking, “Why hadn’t we heard about this back then?”
We hadn’t heard about it because discussing the story is, like watching even a safely edited video of the footage, almost too much to bear. It brings up too many dicey issues, would force too many questions that we, as a society, don’t have the stomach for, because they are scary; because willfully engaging them risks one being labeled a canceling “ist” who endorses some sort of “ism” and, if we want to get on in the world, we do all we can to avoid those labels.
Pressing questions
But the questions must be asked: The press (and platforms like Wikipedia) must explain why some senseless, violent murders merit endless discussion, complete with fiery editorials, while others go unmentioned.
The criminal justice system must answer whether prosecuting those who try to defend the safety of others during outbursts in public places may have contributed to the complete lack of help offered to a girl who was bleeding out.
While we’re at it they’ll need to explain what qualifies a judge to be seated, and why so many of them keep putting violent offenders back out to the streets.
The entertainment industry must be asked whether excessive brutality and violence in television, movies and video games has so desensitized people that they’ll contentedly record a girl’s last breaths on their phone, as though Iryna Zarutska’s death was mere entertainment: girl number one in a real-life version of “Final Destination.”
People who make their living through race-baiting, stoking fires of distrust day-by-day will have to answer for rhetoric that rarely acknowledges the actual humanity of their hated “others” — that people are actual human beings and not mere units of offense — because history has more than proved how deadly is dehumanization.
Hard conversations
Finally, we are all going to have to participate in a hard conversation on how the mentally ill in America are underserved, ignored, or left to fall between the social service cracks because it’s become rude to notice that someone is descending into madness, or is in the grips of mania, or is sinking into a dark, woeful depression.
Writing in “The Free Press,” Nellie Bowles dared to ask of Zarutsak’s murderer, a diagnosed schizophrenic named Decarlos Brown, Jr, “Why was this man walking free?” She called the answer “simple,” writing, “We don’t like to incarcerate our maniacs until they kill. Mental institutions have been deemed too terrible an option. So in America, every lunatic gets one free murder.”
As cynical as she sounds, the Zarutska story (involving a sick person thrusting a knife blade repeatedly into a thin neck), and the recent assault on students attending a school Mass in Minnesota (wrought by a sick person with lots of guns and bullets) both validate Bowles’ point.
Brown’s illness was known — his mother told reporters he’d been placed under psychiatric monitoring, diagnosed then released. The Annunciation School shooter’s self-described depression and suicidal ideation seems to have gone undetected until it was too late.
Our mentally ill are criminally neglected; resources for their care have disappeared thanks to “compassionate” policies, leaving them to suffer on their own. How is it “compassionate” to let sick people stew in their own hellish thoughts? How is it “compassionate” to their victims?
Societal confusion
A screen grab of Iryna Zarutska’s final minutes is trending on social media. She is bleeding, cowering as she looks up in confusion at her attacker. Difficult as it is, we must look at it; we must all look at it.
More than a tragic image of a girl’s final minutes, Iryna there strikes me as the poignant face of a society that has no idea why anything is happening, and no means of connecting a cause-and-effect story that says when you’re not addressing the real needs of the severely mentally ill, chaotic madness is unleashed at large.
It’s also the face of a generation that has grown up feeling unsafe, confused, ignored — offered nothing meaningful beyond dronish dead-end jobs and the escape of their smart phones.
No wonder this is the generation that is turning to religion for succor, and for answers with substance.
They may not realize it, but in doing so they embody the words of T.S. Eliot in “The Rock”:
“Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.”
There are no easy answers to the problems of gun proliferation or social violence and our increasing numbness to it, but these two appalling murders are urgent clues that we must begin talking to each other now — sensibly, seriously and respectfully, as human beings — if we are ever to find them. Here, perhaps, is where the church must find its voice and lead.
Elizabeth Scalia is editor at large for OSV. Follow her on X @theanchoress.
