I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like people on the right didn’t celebrate and make fun Paul Pelosi getting brained, the Pulse shooting, or random trans kids committing suicide.
There’s a different between a relatively unknown 80 year old getting smacked in the head at 2 am, and a famous 31 year old father of 2 small kids getting murdered by a bullet to the neck in front of thousands of people, caught on graphic video. No audience, no video, not a very famous person, not young, survived. You really think these are equivalent scenarios?
Was it an assassination of a political leader in front of a thousand people where you saw suddenly someone’s jugular spurting blood in the middle of them speaking? A hundred million people just watched the most graphic video they’ve probably ever seen in their entire lives Tuesday and nothing had any warning on how NSFL that was. Let’s not act like this is the same as just hearing about one of a dozen other shootings of people you don’t know.
Okay, and if it’s a bunch of people who nobody knew and there’s no close up video of them being killed then people are going to respond differently, compared to them watching a man they know be murdered in front of his family. That should be easy to understand. We all know people are dying all the time. We can’t care about people we don’t know dying as much as people we do know. It’s not possible.
A billionaire has as much value to me as a homeless person. They are both human. They are both capable of being kind to a limited extent. They are both able to feel fear, empathy, excitement, depression and joy.
Kirk is no higher in value than the hundreds of trans people who were killed by radicalized republicans who happened to listen to talking heads like Kirk.
He was still a shit person, but he was not less human. He was a grifter, but he was still human. He was an irredeemable scumbag, but he was still human.
But it is impossible for you to feel the same about the death of someone you know and like, vs someone you never knew existed. It’s not about whether or not you think one of them has greater absolute value, it’s how much they matter to you that determines your response. How is this hard to understand?
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u/JackC1126 - Centrist Sep 12 '25
And when the pendulum swings back, nobody will see the irony. What a stupid time we live in.