What Happened
Yesterday Was NOT About "Freedom."
Tragedy no longer binds us. It tears us further apart.
Sep 11, 2025
Every morning, when I drop my children off at school, I do
something I wish no parent had to do. I memorize what they are wearing. The
shade of a shirt, the scrape on a sneaker, the way a backpack strap slips off a
small shoulder. I press it into memory like a photograph I pray will never be
needed. And I don’t do this out of sentiment. I do it because too many parents
have said the only way they recognized their children after a shooting was by
the clothes they had on.
That truth sits inside me like glass. It slices into every
goodbye. It turns the simple act of watching them walk away into a quiet kind
of mourning. And this — this constant fear — is not the ritual of a free
country.
I do not want this reality for my children. I do not want
it for anyone’s children.
Yesterday was a sorrowful day for America. Not because
Charlie Kirk was a saint — he most certainly was not — but because he was a
man, and his life was ended violently, abruptly, without mercy. He had a life
he was living. He had people who loved him. He was someone’s son. Someone’s
husband. Someone’s father. Someone whose absence will leave an empty chair and
an unfillable silence at the table. And that matters — even to me, even though
I could not stand the words he made a living on or the worldview he championed.
I did not admire him. I did not agree with him. But he was alive yesterday, and
today he is not. And that truth, in and of itself, is profoundly sad.
His words cut deep. His rhetoric was poison poured into
open mouths. It hardened hearts that were still tender, licensed cruelty where
compassion should have taken root, dressed prejudice up as patriotism and
falsehood as truth. His legacy was damage, and I won’t pretend otherwise. For
years I’ve battled his opinions, dismantled his arguments, railed against the
harm he caused. He was an adversary I met again and again in the arena of
ideas. But this? This is not how I ever wanted him to meet his end. Debate is
not death. Disagreement is not execution.
When I first learned he was dead, I cried. Senator Alex
Padilla told me in real time as we were recording a podcast. I didn’t cry
because I loved Charlie Kirk — I didn’t. I cried because this is not what I
want for my country. I cried because this is not what I want for anyone,
anywhere. The tears came from grief, not for him, but for us — because this is
not who we should be.
I’m not asking anyone to mourn Charlie Kirk. I’m asking us
not to lose ourselves. To stop for a moment. To breathe. To hold our children
closer. Because every time violence wins, another piece of our shared humanity
dies with it.
We don’t yet know the shooter’s motive. Maybe it was
political. Maybe it was personal. Maybe it was chaos for its own sake. But in
some ways, the motive is beside the point, because the ending is always the
same. Always a gun. Always a trigger. Always a life gone in a flash. That is
the rhythm of America now — the unbroken drumbeat of violence, so steady we
have taught ourselves not to flinch.
Even if yesterday had never happened, grief would still be
spreading through another home today. Because in this country, grief is the one
thing we manufacture endlessly. Yesterday, while the nation argued over Kirk’s
death, a gun was fired inside Evergreen High in Colorado. A student pulled out
a weapon, shot two classmates, then turned it on himself. One child is fighting
to live. Another will carry scars. And because it happened on the same day as
an assassination, it is already fading from the news, disappearing into the
pile of forgotten tragedies that should never have been ordinary.
That is what terrifies me most: how quickly the
extraordinary becomes routine. How numb we are forced to be just to keep
breathing.
And today, that grief is sharpened by memory. Today is
September 11. Twenty-four years since the sky itself broke open, twenty-four
years since towers turned to ash, since sirens and silence filled the air. I
had just left New York a few months before. My now ex-husband had just left his
job at Windows on the World. That day was meant to bring our country to its
knees — and it did. But it also bound us, if only briefly. Strangers held each
other in the streets. Flags bloomed on porches. We wept together. For one
fragile moment, we remembered what it meant to belong to each other.
How far away that feels now.
Today, tragedy doesn’t bind us. It tears us further apart.
Violence doesn’t humble us; it is spun into propaganda before the blood has
dried.
When Donald Trump was grazed by a bullet last year in
Butler, Pennsylvania, Joe Biden did what leaders are supposed to do. He
steadied the nation. He said, “We resolve our differences at the ballot box,
not with bullets.” He cooled the temperature. He reminded us of our common
humanity. That is leadership. That is democracy, holding on by its fingertips.
Last night, Trump chose the opposite. He offered no pause,
no grace, no truth. He lunged straight for blame. He wrapped Charlie Kirk in
martyrdom and flung accusations at Democrats before the facts could even
breathe. He poured gasoline onto a country already on fire because he cannot
survive without flames.
And the chorus followed. Politicians. Influencers. Fox News
anchors. A choir of rage repeating the same refrains: Democrats are guilty.
Critics share the blame. People like me — people who spent years calling out
Kirk’s cruelty — have blood on our hands. And then they said I should be next.
Think about that. They want me guilty of another person’s
bullet. And they want me punished with my own.
That is particularly grotesque, because we know who built
this tinderbox. We remember.
We remember the chants of “Lock her up!” echoing like
ritual.
We remember the smirks and winks that turned violence into
an inside joke.
We remember January 6 — the mob in tactical gear, the
gallows against a winter sky, fists and flagpoles slamming into police shields.
We remember the blood smeared across marble while a
president watched it unfold like reality TV.
We remember the pardons handed out like confetti afterward.
We remember the laughter when Paul Pelosi’s skull was
nearly crushed, his suffering played for laughs.
We remember Minnesota — Rep. Melissa Hortman and her
husband, murdered. Senator John Hoffman and his wife, riddled with bullets. And
we remember what followed: Senator Mike Lee pointing fingers at “Marxists”
while families bled. Trump refusing even to call Governor Tim Walz. Refusing to
attend the funerals. Calling it all a waste of his time. In the face of grief,
they chose spite.
This did not fall out of the sky. It was cultivated. It was
stoked. It was rewarded. And now the fire is devouring us all.
And while they fanned the flames, they locked every window
that could have let in air. Universal background checks? Blocked. Red flag
laws? Blocked. Safe storage? Blocked. Limits on weapons of war? Blocked. Again
and again. Children murdered in schools, families gunned down in churches,
shoppers slain in aisles — and they shrugged. They told us this was the “price
of freedom.”
Charlie Kirk himself once said some deaths from gun
violence were that price — the toll liberty demanded. But tell me: does
Evergreen High feel like freedom? Did yesterday feel like freedom? No. It felt
like fear. It felt like tyranny. It felt like a country unraveling under the
weight of cruelty, a place where ballots have been traded for bullets. And
still, even knowing he once excused such deaths, I say it again: Charlie Kirk
did not deserve this end. None of us do.
I can hold two truths. I can say Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric
was destructive, and I can say his murder is a tragedy. I can despise what he
spread and still mourn the violence that took him. What I will not do is let
anyone tell me that my words — my refusal to stay silent — are violence, while
their incitement is patriotism.
How I wish we had a leader who could turn the temperature
down. Someone capable of compassion. Someone who would stand before us and say:
political violence has no place here. Ever. Oh how I wish.
Instead, we have a man who thrives on chaos, who breathes
rage the way the rest of us breathe air. And behind him, a movement addicted to
division because without it they are nothing. No vision. No policies. No
solutions. Just grievance. Just fury. Just hunger for power at any cost.
Yesterday was a dark day for America. Not because Charlie
Kirk was noble — he wasn’t — but because his violent death revealed, yet again,
the sickness eating us alive: a nation where rage is currency, where violence
is strategy, where every tomorrow threatens to look like yesterday.
And I am terrified of what comes next.
Because it is not just our safety on the line — it is our
decency. I am afraid we are losing our capacity for compassion, our instinct
for empathy, our basic humanity. I am afraid we are letting cruelty become our
default setting. And if we let that happen, if we allow ourselves to become as
callous as the people who celebrate this violence, then the experiment of
democracy is already over.
I do not want to memorize my children’s clothes every
morning, whispering a silent prayer they come home alive. I do not want their
inheritance to be fear. I do not want to live in a country where every goodbye
could be forever.
So hear me when I say this:
We will not be ruled by terror.
We will not be quieted by bloodshed.
We will not let democracy be dismantled by cowards who kill
from the shadows.
We will not be gaslit into believing we have blood on our
hands for daring to call out dangerous rhetoric. And we will not accept threats
of retribution — threats that glorify cruelty and demand silence, that thirst
for more violence and more war.
We will not hand our children a future where fear is the
air they breathe.
We will stand in the open. We will pause. We will breathe.
We will hold our children closer. Because our humanity is the one thing they
cannot take unless we surrender it to them.
Because democracy is not inherited like an heirloom. It is
hammered into existence by exhausted, terrified, furious people who refuse to
quit.
And that is who we are.
Not the mobs. Not the executioners. Not the cowards who
hide behind guns and call it strength.
We are the ones who stitch the fabric back together, thread
by trembling thread. The ones who carry lanterns into rooms that reek of smoke.
The ones who cradle each other when the weight of grief would crush us. The
ones who insist — against every bullet, every lie, every coward’s threat — that
mercy, not violence, will have the last word.
Because if Charlie Kirk’s murder teaches us anything, it is
that violence is never an answer — it does not resolve a single argument, it
only carves deeper scars into a nation already bleeding. And if September 11
still teaches us anything, twenty-four years later, it is that grief is a
crossroads: it can harden us into cruelty, or it can soften us into kinship. I
remember how, for one trembling instant, that day bound us together — strangers
clutching strangers, a wounded country remembering it still had a heart. The
question now is whether we will let bullets keep shredding what is left of that
heart, or whether we will summon the strength to hold on to our decency, our
empathy, our capacity to feel for one another before it slips away forever.
Because this is not freedom.
This is not justice.
And this is not the America we promised our children — the
ones walking into classrooms with backpacks too heavy for their small
shoulders, the ones who deserve a future built on safety and decency, not on
blood and fear.
And I, for one, will not let violence write their future.
Not now. Not ever.