“It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims”
Aristotle
Photo credit: Katie Rain for BabyCenter
It shames me to say this, but I see a lot of my younger self in Charlie Kirk. I shudder to think what harm I could have done if I had had the same opportunity to influence so many young people when I was spouting off some of the same toxic shit that Charlie was. Like Kirk, I was born and raised in a Christian cult, and for many years, that was how I saw the world. I may have tried to blast my way out of Catholicism with hefty doses of alcohol and sex once I was free of my parents’ supervision, but that type of kneejerk reaction is very different from a genuine, internal shift. Once I was safely married and mothered, I reverted quickly to the shelter of my traditional beliefs and joined a Catholic group whose mission was to support expectant mothers as a means of discouraging them from terminating pregnancies. “Abortion is an abomination”, I brashly opined to a very dear friend, who reeled in shock at my callous idiocy. She’d had a termination some years before and was understandably hurt by my comment. It wasn’t until after my second baby and a bout of post-natal depression followed by a pregnancy scare that the reality hit me personally. I wasn’t pregnant as it turned out, but if I had been, I would not have been able to cope with another baby, and I knew that now. “Experience is a dear school, but fools will learn in no other” as my grandaddy would say, and like all fools, I was unable to truly understand a situation until it affected me directly.
Charlie Kirk was another such fool, and he now has no way of emerging from his stupidity, which is sad. What is sadder is that, even had he lived, the conditions required for that change to take place, probably would never have cropped up in his life. I remember when I was in Year 12, we had a guest speaker come to our school, an Aboriginal bloke who kicked off the session by speaking to us in fast dialect. We were all a bit stunned, being completely insular white kids, who were living on the upside of the invisible apartheid that was Perth at the time, and he laughed at our horrified faces. He moved quickly into English and said something that I didn’t understand then but certainly do now. He said: “you know, it’s only you girls who are going to be able to have some idea of what I’m going to describe, because you will experience similar things as you go through life.” He went on to give us a talk on the foolishness of colour prejudice and sexism, and how harmful these things were to everybody, including the perpetrators. At the end of the talk, something strange happened. Two members of our class went up to talk to him. Their faces had an animated glow that we had never seen on them as they excitedly chattered to him, finding relatives in common and exchanging stories. Once he left, they went back to being what they usually were: stolen-generation Aboriginal kids pretending to be white so that the rest of us could feel comfortable. Yet, just for a moment, these two girls had given us a glimpse into a parallel world that we did not know existed. A world that had been brutishly erased by forces that lifted us up while pushing down our two classmates.
Like us, Charlie Kirk believed that his reality was the only reality. Raised in a bubble where white men are masters, women are dependants, everybody is heterosexual and brown people shouldn’t fly planes, Charlie’s view of the world would have been laughably quaint if it wasn’t so sinister. Like me as a 30-year-old Catholic, smugly asserting that “I would never have an abortion”, he never considered that he simply had the unearned luck of being born into circumstances that gave him access to more choice than many other people. More disturbingly, we were both blind to the damage that our very immature and uninformed opinions could do to vulnerable people. It is no surprise that Charlie Kirk’s notion of masculine strength and leadership were so appealing to young men since brittle, boyish immaturity was what underscored so many of his preoccupations. He emphasised the most vacuous, fragile veneer of masculinity as a model for strong and dependable male leadership and sold this as an ideal. Men who pulled their weight in domestic tasks were “soy-boy cucks”, and a man’s pride was centred solely on his ability to provide and protect. Yet the world desperately needs the type of male leadership that has the capacity for endurance and suffering that is typically developed in nurturing babies and toddlers. There is nobody more enraging, exhausting and irrational than a very young child and the superhuman self-control that is often required is heroic. I was recently on a long-haul flight seated near a young couple with an 18 month -old baby. It wasn’t a bad baby as babies go, but it really kicked off at seatbelt time. It writhed and shrieked, insanely wrestling its way out of the father’s grasp, and had to be repeatedly restrained. It was a great relief when the seatbelt sign went off and the mother took the baby. However, the child continued to cry inconsolably until it was handed back to the father, when the tears turned off like a magic switch, and the rosy head lay down on his shoulder. Throughout the flight, the father walked and bounced, rocked and soothed, pacing slowly and deliberately up and down the aisle. He was tired and pale, but calm and strong. His body seemed to say “I am here. I am your father and I will always be here, whatever you throw at me, I am big enough and man enough to handle this for as long as it is needed” He overcame, through many hours, the normal human response of impatience and rage that we have all felt as parents at times, and which in many tragic cases leads to people losing control and hurting children. His strength lay in nurture, not domination. His self-control and tenderness exemplified the type of manhood that should be the ideal presented to young men, not the rigid, superficial braggadocio so beloved of Charlie Kirk and those supporting him.
What ultimately killed Charlie Kirk was the logical extension of the energy and values that he preached. Shoot first and ask questions later. The man with the biggest gun wins. No chance at redemption, humility or change. What a waste.
If you know a young man who is looking for information on courageous, masculine leadership from men who probably don’t drink soy milk, you can’t do better than the website below:
Gay Taylor 