Beautiful world, please unite us, not divide us
This past week, I’ve felt such grief. The night before Charlie Kirk was murdered, Ellie, my best friend and the wonderful mother of our daughter Miriam, and I were talking about how the world so often feels like an onslaught. Raising a child today is as much about shielding them from that onslaught as it is about showing them the beauty that still exists.
The following evening, the devastating news broke that Charlie Kirk had been assassinated. I’ve followed American politics with great care, and so I knew of Charlie’s work well.
What is most heartbreaking is that it seems that the greatest victims are always the children. Charlie, a loving husband and doting father, leaves two children without a father on earth.
It has also been heartbreaking to see that the western world has reached a point where we cannot collectively grieve, not just Charlie and his family, but what this represents as to how lost we have become as a society.
We don’t know the full story of what happened. Motives are uncertain. But whatever the cause, we should grieve for what these children have suffered, the absence of a father who, whatever else people think of him, was by all accounts a loving dad. And we should also grieve the world we stand in today.
That’s the bridge we stand on: acknowledging tragedy and fighting passionately to ensure it doesn’t repeat.
What I find most heart-wrenching is this: the beauty you see in children is they don’t carry hate in their hearts. That kind of hatred is learned. And we never make things better by hating others or by hurting them.
But it forces a larger question: what kind of world are we creating together? What parts of our society are harming us, rather than healing us?
If we know that social media fuels division more than connection, we have to turn it off. If we know that the way we debate politics now dehumanises people, then we have to change how we speak and listen. If we see that our children are growing up in a culture of outrage, we have to be brave enough to offer them a culture of hope instead.
Walking on Clacton beach this morning, the beauty and solitude of nature remind me of what really matters.
At heart, it’s a safe world for our kids, a life lived in peace, a society built on love, kindness, generosity, community, and presence. That is the world we can still choose to create, if we are willing to let go of the things that are tearing us apart.
With love,
Benjamin