American Insights

Who Are We?

On the dark, seemingly endless autumn night of Saturday, November 23, 1963, the journalist James Reston began to write. “America wept tonight, not alone for its dead young president, but for itself,” he wrote in a special New York Times piece. “The grief was general,” he added, “for somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best.” 

Earlier that day, President John F. Kennedy was shot in the head in his limousine right next to his wife and pronounced dead less than an hour later in Dallas, Texas. 

The nation seemed to screech to a haunting halt. That day, as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield later eulogized, there was once the sound of laughter, of life, of possibility; “in a moment, it was no more,” he said. “A piece of each of us died at that moment.” 

Writing the next day, Reston noticed something in the fog of confusion and sorrow that made Kennedy’s sudden and gory death all the more tragic. “The indictment extended itself beyond the assassin,” he wrote, “for something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order.” 

The Speaker of the House summed up the events of that dark day and week when he lamented, “My God! My God! What are we coming to?” 

The public assassination of Charlie Kirk on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, is one of the darkest days in our nation’s history, and what I wrote above is what I couldn’t help but recall when I and countless others watched the gut wrenching footage of the moment when a gunman took the life of a husband and father simply because he disagreed with him—and on a college campus, of all places, where the free exchange of ideas is the entire point. 

It was cliché then, as it is even in this moment of writing, to express disbelief at the fact that the young life of a man so engaged in our national politics for years was suddenly, hatefully, and disturbingly cut short. 

This is not who we are has been a common saying this week, and even I caught myself saying it. Yet, it is not true. What happened to Charlie, a man I loved and respected even though our politics could not have been more different, is exactly who we are right now. 

From the moment that gunman woke up that morning and decided to make a wife a widow and children fatherless because he disliked another man’s views, to the moment when he actually pulled the trigger and sent a round of ammunition into Charlie’s neck, ending his life, is precisely the moment when we, as Americans, got to see ourselves for who we truly are. 

We are deeply troubled. We are a people whose nation is drowning itself in hate, division, violence, and death. We are a nation of enemies, not friends and neighbors. We are a nation of clenched fists, not open hands, of gnashing teeth, not bright smiles. We are a nation whose soul is utterly poisoned.

The moment I learned of the shooting, there was a glimmer of hope that suppressed, momentarily, the dourness that soon came over me. Maybe the bullet just nicked him, I thought. Maybe he will survive. 

I prayed several times for my brother in Christ. I cried for the life of a man whose words I vehemently detested at times. 

As a student of history, I could sense the wheels turning in my own mind, reminding me of countless other Americans whose lives were senselessly and selfishly taken, whose deaths each time revealed us to be lower than ever before. 

Then I saw the footage. I saw the life of a once vibrant, cheerful American leave his body in an instant. I knew, deep down that there was no surviving that. It hit me, as it did Reston. It was a moment I never wanted to experience—a moment I never thought I would experience. 

It was a day that is now etched into my mind and soul. But to be perfectly frank, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Because each of us should watch that footage in horror but almost with a sense of duty, seeing, with our own eyes, the America we have allowed to exist.

Charlie’s death brings me to tears even now, because it wasn’t just he who died that day. There was a piece of his wife, his children, his family, his friends, and we, his fellow Americans, who died, also. 

A little piece of each of us, too, was part of the swirling powers of divisiveness and evil that moved a young man, raised well, to grab a rifle and take someone else’s life for the entire country and world to see.

Charlie was not a man with whom I agreed on a great many political things. But he was one of us. He was an American who had the boldness to speak his mind—as was his natural and constitutional right—and the courage to stand and not cower.

However far things may have drifted, Charlie remained a quintessentially American character—a man devoted to a set of ideals and unafraid to live and speak them. He was an American, pure and simple. And no American, whatever their politics or beliefs, should be gunned down for having thoughts of their own.

Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that JFK was not slain by ammunition alone, but “by a morally inclement climate,” one “filled with heavy torrents of false accusations, jostling winds of hatred, and raging storms of violence,” a climate “where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express dissent through violence and murder.” 

Americans in 1963, he said, needed “soul-searching.” If left unchecked, King warned that “this virus of hate that has seeped into the veins of the nation… will lead inevitably to our moral and spiritual doom.”

Earl Warren perhaps said it best: “If we really love this country, if we truly love justice and mercy, if we fervently want to make this nation better for those who are to follow, we can at least abjure the hatred that consumes people, the false accusations that divide us, and the bitterness that begets violence.”

The same, tragically, is true of us today.

In the end, perhaps only God can change us. That’s what King preached in 1954: “We must put God back at the center of our thinking.” Not the God of doctrine imposed, but the God of love expressed through each of us. 

Charlie’s death must be to us in 2025 what Charleston was to those in 2015: a tragic visitation of God’s grace, as President Obama said, allowing us to see where we’ve been blind, where we’ve been lost, and where to find our better selves. 

The alternative is unthinkable, because it means the very death of our soul—a soul, though poisoned, that can still be cured with little acts of respect, kindness, and common patriotism. 

The truth is that we can do anything if we all do a little something. The test—a perennial one—is once again before each of us. Our common bonds of affection must not be broken. They must be mended by goodwill toward all. 

Charlie’s death, and the death of all those of late, must “yet swell the chorus of the Union” within our hearts, “when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” 

Take a moment to remember what was lost, and resolve to be part of the healing, not the wound. Our nation depends on that very moment of reflection and choice. 

Charles James Kirk, 1993-2025. “God, family, country. In that order.”