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Charles Bowden, sgraffito by Alice Leora Briggs

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Last time I said I was going to look for some creativity or inspiration, and so I went fishing for a week up in my favorite mountains, and it worked. I forgot all about the problems of the world and felt like a new man, happy to be alive, but then I came back down from the mountains and Charlie Kirk was shot at the university where I used to work, from the top of the building where I had an office I almost never went to. Back then, over a decade ago, lots of students at this school were carrying guns in their backpacks.

I asked one, “Why do you bring a gun to class?”

And he said, “To fight evil.”

And I said, “In school, we learn how to fight evil with words, not guns.”

He said nothing, but the look on his face was like he wanted to shoot me, like I was evil.

Charlie Kirk thought he was teaching students how to fight evil with words, this was his purpose in speaking at Utah Valley University, but a student (from another school) thought Kirk was spreading hatred—that Kirk was evil and needed to be killed.

It’s all very confusing and kind of scary. Now the flags around town are flying at half mast and people are saying Kirk is a Christian martyr, like Joan of Arc, and that democrats and liberals are evil.

I know I should be out talking to people about what is happening to our country, but I also know I don’t want to hear what they will say. Not yet. So I’m going to play a piece by Charles Bowden that seems to sum up what’s happening now, even though he wrote it 30 years ago, in a book called “Blood Orchid.” He called it a response or a riff on Imagine, the song by John Lennon.

Thanks for listening, thanks for donating, and thanks to Lisa Miller, Erica Heilman and Alice Leora Briggs.

I’m going to try to stay calm and ride out this wave of insanity.

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