Thanks to Kate B.
Throughout the last few years I’ve emphasized to my teammates at Citizen University that we must not let everything in civic life get nationalized — that we must help our network of CU catalysts practice humanity and civic power and civic character in the local relational contexts of the places where they live.
But I know that is increasingly difficult. The assassination of Charlie Kirk this week was terrible in its own right — no one should be murdered for their views and political action. It is dangerous also because it may now accelerate the nationalizing and literal weaponizing of our politics, the dehumanizing of opponents, the hardening of everyone’s hearts.
So, with my team today and now with this wider ecosystem, I do come back to my original emphasis, with a variation. We can and must help people “live like a citizen” wherever they live — to practice how to see, feel, hear, serve the people around them in their full complex humanity. But more than ever now, to sense the pain around them. And neither we nor they can be preferential about our pain-sensing. A kind of pain has led millions of people to follow Kirk. A kind of pain has led someone to take Kirk’s life. A kind of pain is pulsing through cities where people fear their own government and their neighbors. There are so many other kinds of pain making our politics tumultuous in every quarter, shaping how people show up or don’t in the lives of their towns and neighborhoods.
The “habits of heart and mind” that inform our programs and projects at CU — that keep a community from disintegrating — are not just about the sensing. They are also about inviting each other to convert what we sense and feel into what we do and choose: build or destroy, heal or scorn. There are ways to relieve pain that involve inflicting it on others, and there are ways to relieve pain that involve solving problems with others, making sense of things together, and in the process making each other more wholly human.
That choice is not just for the day after a headline-making act of political violence, and not just on 9/11 + 24. It’s not only about partisan or ideological divides. Making that choice doesn’t require the permission of some prominent leader or influencer. It doesn’t require me or you to validate views we don’t like. Nor does it invite us to be the savior of people we think are benighted, nor imply that we have surrendered naively to them. We recommit to humanizing habits to save ourselves, our own civic souls, and simply out of the other deep principle we teach at CU — that society becomes how you behave.
I know it’s hard, and it’s probably going to get harder. We’ve got to keep at it, with heart and courage. We truly have no choice. If we are to live together we must choose to live, together. And to show others that it is possible.
– Eric