Objectifying Charlie Kirk

I have a little bit of murderer in me. I have a little bit of perversion in me. I have a little bit of a sadist in me as well. I know I am not alone in this. I do not believe that these parts of me are genetic. I am not a Natural Born Killer, as the title of the Oliver Stone movie suggests that some of us are. 

I believe I am a product of the environment in which I grew up, as Stone’s film shows. It is an environment that is convinced that vengeance, or “karma” as many online have taken to calling it, is good; that violence is an acceptable form of entertainment with no impact on our minds and souls; that legalized porn and normalized, in many places, prostitution are forms of freedom of expression or speech, thinking they play no part in the collapse of cultures and society. Ours is a world in a deep, violent sleep—one so deep that brutal murder won’t even wake it up.

While scrolling through social media recently, I came across a video that had as part of its title the words “Instant Karma.” The video was relatively mild and showed various examples of people “getting what they deserve” for their bad behavior. I found myself entertained and watched more. My being entertained wasn’t surprising considering that I had been bullied as a tween and teen. 

I watched a few more, and then other videos started appearing in my feed: videos of car crashes, people fighting, violent confrontations with police, and then of war. I realized that I was enjoying watching people suffer, and I kept hearing myself say, “Good, that’s what they get.” After watching this content, I noticed a difference in both the way I drove and my reaction to other drivers, as well as my ability to interact with people and resolve disagreements without becoming angry and irritable. Therefore, I cut off my social media use.

My first video game was Pong, back in the late 1970s, and my first movie was Star Wars, around the same time. I was 7 or 8 years old. These two forms of entertainment stirred something in me that hadn’t previously been stirred, as I discuss in my upcoming book Becoming a Good Man. Pong was the first time I remember wanting to smash something that I wasn’t good at. I’d been bad at sports that I played with my family before playing this video game. I would get frustrated but not violent. Star Wars had an entertaining story, but it was the “action” that appealed to me—the violence of shooting and fighting. 

Pong led me to The Legend of Zelda, which led to Mortal Kombat, which led to Grand Theft Auto III, where I sat in my living room pretending to sell drugs, sleep with hookers, and then kill them along with many others in the game. Star Wars led me to 9 to 5, which led to Fatal Attraction, which led to Friday the 13th, which led to The Last House on the Left and The Accused, where women were raped and men were brutally murdered. My fantasy life began to become more twisted, So, after a long dark spell, I left the entertainment industry behind.

A Playboy magazine of unknown origin was my first exposure to nudity and sexuality at age 8 or 9. I knew something was wrong with looking at women this way, but two women in my life told me that there was nothing wrong with it, so I kept looking and eventually began to act out sexually. Playboy led to another more explicit magazine, which led to straight porn videos, then to gay porn videos, then to phone sex, and then to a few hookups with people of the same sex. 

People became a collection of body parts to be used for pleasure. During this time, I found it increasingly difficult to maintain my familial and platonic relationships as well as establish new ones. I recognized porn as part of my problem. So I threw out my porn stash, then later deleted the porn I downloaded, then later blocked porn with a filter. Then I got a cell phone for teens to block apps and chat lines. This battle is ongoing.

Video games and entertainment normalized violence for me. Porn taught me that people are objects: a collection of body parts. Social media brought these two false realities together in my life. The videos I watched show real people who suffered real consequences and experienced real suffering. The space in my heart that should hold love, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness was filled with the desire for revenge and punishment on those whom I felt deserved it. I was deadened to seeing people as deserving of dignity, respect, compassion, and protection from harm. As I filtered humans as objects, my anger—and, in many cases, hatred for them—grew. This is the environment in which the assassination of Charlie Kirk occurred. 

Revenge cannot be nurtured, violence used as entertainment, and human beings objectified without terrible impacts on society. If we do not turn away from these poisons, the wars, school shootings, rapes, and murders will continue to proliferate and become more brutal and barbaric. The time for a moderate response has passed. Taking down the videos of Charlie Kirk’s murder and banning hate speech are not enough. We can’t “govern” and censor our way out of this.

We as individuals have to choose to step out of the stream of vengeance, violence, and objectification we live in. We can only change society by changing ourselves. All three of these are connected. One abandoned while the others are indulged will not solve the problem. We have tried the “can we dehumanize each other without consequences” experiment, and the bloody results are in. Human beings cannot live this way without self-destructing. Will we step away, or will we continue to live the lie that says we can objectify people and watch their suffering and death as entertainment and have no consequences? 

Charlie Kirk and many others died because they were no longer human to their killers. They had become nothing more than an object. Large numbers of Americans who would never think of killing or purposely injuring someone physically have varying degrees of murderer, sadist, and sexual deviant in them. We are a nation of objectifiers. We participate in assassinations, rapes, and other brutalities without being aware because we are deadened inside to the little bits of monster we carry around in us. Will we continue to nurture these sick parts of us, or will we say enough and turn to the Divine Physician? By stepping away from what ails us, we say to Him, “Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed” (Jeremiah 17:14).