After 9/10

Dave Barry is a famous humor writer who’s been at it since the 80s. I don’t know if he still has his weekly column in the Miami Herald, but I used to read his collections as a kid, and even found his column in the Las Vegas Review-Journal every Thursday.

Several of his pieces were so funny that I went back to them multiple times, usually spoofing on life as a suburban dad in Florida, or occasionally on some random bit of nationwide news that he could riff on. There’s one that I read a single time, but I still remember the opening paragraph nearly verbatim, 24 years later. It was published on September 13th, 2001, just two days after 9/11.

No humor column today. I don't want to write it, and you don't want to read it. No words of wisdom, either. I wish I were wise enough to say something that would help make sense of this horror, something that would help ease the unimaginable pain of the victims' loved ones, but I'm not that wise. I'm barely capable of thinking. Like many others, I've spent the hours since Tuesday morning staring at the television screen, sometimes crying, sometimes furious, but mostly just stunned.

Swap out the TV for a smartphone screen, and I could say this exact same thing about Charlie Kirk’s assassination four days ago. Minus the crying—not because I’m tough or anything, but because I’m too far removed personally from Charlie Kirk. I save that for family.

Over the last day or two, some of my thoughts have come together as dust has settled, and I’ve been able to make sense of a few things here and there. This is where I’m at:

I’d had a good day on Wednesday. Work was easy. My wife had the car because hers was in the shop. She picked me up, drove me to the comic shop where I picked up this week’s pulls, and then we came home. I took off my boots. I checked my phone. And I started to see tweets about someone shooting Charlie Kirk.

Like I said in my YouTube video the next day, I was more or less lukewarm on Kirk. I knew of him, but didn’t have any strong opinions. A friend mentioned him to me recently and my take was that I don’t care about pundits any more, and I don’t trust people who sell their opinions. Fairly or unfairly, I lumped Kirk in with that general cluster of personalities, because I was unfamiliar with his game.

I didn’t know about his age, his origins, his methods, his ethos, or his impact. He was kind of the cool Gen Z conservative guy with a high intellect who was capable of explaining, persuading, and effectively debating ideas he disagreed with. In the last few days, as you might imagine, I’ve heard a lot more about what he did, going from campus to campus and just letting people ask him questions while he explained his values.

He was very successful at it, and had a wide and positive impact on an entire generation—a generation that hangs out in places I don’t (TikTok)—because tributes have poured in all around the world. The UK cheered his name during a million-strong Tommy Robinson demonstration. Maori residents did a haka for him in New Zealand. Apparently something popped off in Spain, too. I guess I live under a rock, or I’m just a middle-aged guy who’s spent the last several years on the night shift. I just didn’t know.

Regardless of all that, the dude was ambitious, successful, smart, and made inroads with a demographic that has, traditionally, belonged to The Other Side. And he did it “the right way,” with civility and brains, avoiding the kind of over-the-top bombast that you get out of yesteryear’s shock jocks like Hannity and Limbaugh.

He wasn’t a low-T poser like Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro. He wore suits and ties, went to church, talked openly about his faith, smiled, and above all, he meant it. He was the least-threatening dude in the game, a 6’4” golden retriever in human form. He was effective, his work threatened the last sixty years of left-wing supremacy among youths…

…so some piece of shit put a bullet through his neck in front of his wife and his three year-old daughter for it.

This has been the greatest mask-off moment of my lifetime, watching so many terrible people decloak in the wake of a good man’s murder, tapdancing on his grave for the sin of wrongthink, for dissuading an entire generation of people around the world away from civilizational suicide. I’ve had eureka days before, where you accept that your peers live in an entirely different reality from you, but good night above this is something else altogether.

I’ll say it again: a guy put a bullet through Charlie Kirk’s neck, on camera, in front of a crowd with his wife and his three year-old daughter.

There are people hooting and hollering and cheering and laughing and encouraging it. They’re demanding more. They want the same thing done to his wife. They’re lying about the shooter. They’re defacing tributes to Kirk’s memory. To quote Ya Boi Zack, these are people who have dog shit where their souls should be.

Normally I don’t cuss in my posts. Today I don’t care. I’m over the hump, and if you’re reading this you’ve heard a bad word before. I like to think that keeping that part of my vocabulary holstered over the years has (hopefully) given it the appropriate impact when I start letting it fly. Graham saying a couple of potty words is lower on the scale than celebrities, military personnel, politicians, and pundits celebrating the on-screen murder of an innocent man.

Dave Barry didn’t have much to say after 9/11, and was certainly out of funny words. He concluded his column with some optimism, and the hope that America would eventually catch who did this, and we would become more unified in the meantime. I’m sad to say that we’ve let him down in a lot of ways, only because now my kids have to grow up in the detritus of that failure.

I’m not going to pass that mindset onto my kids, though. After July 13th, 2024, I had to explain to my sons what an assassination was, and why people attempt it. On September 10th, 2025, I had to remind them. This is the world they live in, the world they’ll inherit. If my Millennial generation carries the distilled wisdom of the Boomers that made me, then my Alpha children deserve whatever leg-up I can give them. They’ll come equipped to understand the playing field as they enter it, that there are people who want them dead simply because they can’t successfully argue their own position in a debate.

I’d like to have Dave Barry’s solemn optimism. And I’ll still try to. But I’m going to sprinkle it with a fair dose of pragmatism. My children will endure the world of their generation even better than I’ve been able to endure mine.

In closing, here’s some recommended reading: IN DEFENSE OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT, by Larry Correia. The Left will do what it always does in the wake of a shooting: try to convince you to hand over your guns, so that it’s even easier for them to kill you. Correia, a subject matter expert on firearms and their use, factually dismantles every possible argument for disarmament and gun control. Read it and learn.

More important—and I’m recommending this because I know how few of you read to the end of my posts—do check out the Book of Mormon if you haven’t already. You can read the entire thing online for free on the Church’s website, including audio playback in the browser. In addition to what it teaches about the Gospel, there are abundant lessons about human nature and the collapse of a society that embraces pride over honor.

I’ll close with this talk that I gave on that very subject, highlighting events in 600 BC, 75 BC, and 400 AD, at the beginning, middle, and end of the Nephite civilization. Listen and tell me what you think.

Anyway, that’s all I want to share this week. We’ll get back to reading and writing updates next weekend.