Mourning and Memory

Today is 9/11.

We’re told to never forget, and we’ll never forget the victims. We’ll never forget how we felt seeing the towers fall.

But we will forget how our leaders used our grief against us. And we should be ready for those leaders to do the same thing after the murder of Charlie Kirk.

In the weeks after 9/11, I remember the theater. The endless flags. The way we were all told, quietly but urgently, that now was not the time for nuance. That the only appropriate response was vengeance, and the only appropriate response to vengeance was applause.

And in that patriotic roar, brown people bled. Muslims, Sikhs, immigrants who had the misfortune of being in a country that was suddenly looking for villains. I remember mosques set on fire. I remember cab drivers pulled from their cars. I remember how quickly a grieving nation became a violent one, and how eager its leaders were to ride that grief into a war based on lies.

So when I see flags at half-mast for Charlie Kirk, when I hear Gavin Newsom call him a "brilliant thinker," when Jared Polis, the gay governor of Colorado, calls for a moment of silence to honor the legacy of a man who wanted people like him stoned to death, I don’t just see the past being rewritten. I see the future being written by the right to benefit their agenda.

I see another tragedy being bent into a weapon.

Let’s be plain: Charlie Kirk was not a good man. He was not a complicated man, either. He was a well-funded bigot with a camera and a strategy. He wanted women barefoot, Black people unemployed, trans people beaten in bathrooms, Muslims deported, Jews distrusted, and gay people dead. He said so, often. Repeatedly. Proudly.

What he built with Turning Point USA was not a “youth movement.” It was a recruitment pipeline for young fascists. He turned high schools into hate factories and frat houses into breeding grounds for stochastic terrorism. He mainstreamed cruelty. He professionalized it.

And now, he’s being canonized.

The very people he empowered are using his death to go hunting. Not for the killer, they don’t need the killer. They need the excuse. They need the narrative. And they have it: a leftist did this. A queer did this. A Palestinian sympathizer did this. Maybe not literally, but spiritually. Ideologically. Emotionally.

And so they come for all of us.

We’ve lived through this. We saw when protestors were labeled terrorists. We saw when Muslim charities were shuttered on suspicion alone. We saw when "anti-American" became the kiss of death for dissenters, and the state learned to scan for the brown, the loud, the left-leaning, the unpatriotic. And we see it now: Charlie Kirk is dead, and somehow the ones in danger are all the people who were his victims.

That’s the gaslight.

You do not have to cry for someone who wanted you gone.

You do not have to respect a man who made a career out of degrading yours.

You do not have to perform mourning just because the state has decided this death is sacred.

What you have to do is brace. Because they will use his death to justify more surveillance, more censorship, more criminalization of protest. They will use it to grow the machine that already killed so many people like us slowly, invisibly, with policy and propaganda and plausible deniability.

We are not at the beginning. We are in the middle, and they will do everything they can to decide how this ends.

So no, I will not light a candle for Charlie Kirk. I will not cry because the empire has lowered its flag. I will cry for all the people this moment will hurt. I will cry for the marginalized who will continue to be scapegoats. I will light a candle for the groups the President will demonize.

And I will remember what we forgot after 9/11: that grief without memory is dangerous, and mourning without truth is a weapon.

And they’ll use that weapon, again and again, so long as power mistakes pain for permission.