What Happened Yesterday Was NOT About "Freedom."

Tragedy no longer binds us. It tears us further apart.

Every morning, when I drop my children off at school, I do something I wish no parent had to do. I memorize what they are wearing. The shade of a shirt, the scrape on a sneaker, the way a backpack strap slips off a small shoulder. I press it into memory like a photograph I pray will never be needed. And I don’t do this out of sentiment. I do it because too many parents have said the only way they recognized their children after a shooting was by the clothes they had on.

That truth sits inside me like glass. It slices into every goodbye. It turns the simple act of watching them walk away into a quiet kind of mourning. And this — this constant fear — is not the ritual of a free country.

I do not want this reality for my children. I do not want it for anyone’s children.

Yesterday was a sorrowful day for America. Not because Charlie Kirk was a saint — he most certainly was not — but because he was a man, and his life was ended violently, abruptly, without mercy. He had a life he was living. He had people who loved him. He was someone’s son. Someone’s husband. Someone’s father. Someone whose absence will leave an empty chair and an unfillable silence at the table. And that matters — even to me, even though I could not stand the words he made a living on or the worldview he championed. I did not admire him. I did not agree with him. But he was alive yesterday, and today he is not. And that truth, in and of itself, is profoundly sad.

His words cut deep. His rhetoric was poison poured into open mouths. It hardened hearts that were still tender, licensed cruelty where compassion should have taken root, dressed prejudice up as patriotism and falsehood as truth. His legacy was damage, and I won’t pretend otherwise. For years I’ve battled his opinions, dismantled his arguments, railed against the harm he caused. He was an adversary I met again and again in the arena of ideas. But this? This is not how I ever wanted him to meet his end. Debate is not death. Disagreement is not execution.

When I first learned he was dead, I cried. Senator Alex Padilla told me in real time as we were recording a podcast. I didn’t cry because I loved Charlie Kirk — I didn’t. I cried because this is not what I want for my country. I cried because this is not what I want for anyone, anywhere. The tears came from grief, not for him, but for us — because this is not who we should be.

I’m not asking anyone to mourn Charlie Kirk. I’m asking us not to lose ourselves. To stop for a moment. To breathe. To hold our children closer. Because every time violence wins, another piece of our shared humanity dies with it.

We don’t yet know the shooter’s motive. Maybe it was political. Maybe it was personal. Maybe it was chaos for its own sake. But in some ways, the motive is beside the point, because the ending is always the same. Always a gun. Always a trigger. Always a life gone in a flash. That is the rhythm of America now — the unbroken drumbeat of violence, so steady we have taught ourselves not to flinch.

Even if yesterday had never happened, grief would still be spreading through another home today. Because in this country, grief is the one thing we manufacture endlessly. Yesterday, while the nation argued over Kirk’s death, a gun was fired inside Evergreen High in Colorado. A student pulled out a weapon, shot two classmates, then turned it on himself. One child is fighting to live. Another will carry scars. And because it happened on the same day as an assassination, it is already fading from the news, disappearing into the pile of forgotten tragedies that should never have been ordinary.

That is what terrifies me most: how quickly the extraordinary becomes routine. How numb we are forced to be just to keep breathing.

And today, that grief is sharpened by memory. Today is September 11. Twenty-four years since the sky itself broke open, twenty-four years since towers turned to ash, since sirens and silence filled the air. I had just left New York a few months before. My now ex-husband had just left his job at Windows on the World. That day was meant to bring our country to its knees — and it did. But it also bound us, if only briefly. Strangers held each other in the streets. Flags bloomed on porches. We wept together. For one fragile moment, we remembered what it meant to belong to each other.

How far away that feels now.

Today, tragedy doesn’t bind us. It tears us further apart. Violence doesn’t humble us; it is spun into propaganda before the blood has dried.

When Donald Trump was grazed by a bullet last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, Joe Biden did what leaders are supposed to do. He steadied the nation. He said, “We resolve our differences at the ballot box, not with bullets.” He cooled the temperature. He reminded us of our common humanity. That is leadership. That is democracy, holding on by its fingertips.

Last night, Trump chose the opposite. He offered no pause, no grace, no truth. He lunged straight for blame. He wrapped Charlie Kirk in martyrdom and flung accusations at Democrats before the facts could even breathe. He poured gasoline onto a country already on fire because he cannot survive without flames.

And the chorus followed. Politicians. Influencers. Fox News anchors. A choir of rage repeating the same refrains: Democrats are guilty. Critics share the blame. People like me — people who spent years calling out Kirk’s cruelty — have blood on our hands. And then they said I should be next.

Think about that. They want me guilty of another person’s bullet. And they want me punished with my own.

That is particularly grotesque, because we know who built this tinderbox. We remember.

We remember the chants of “Lock her up!” echoing like ritual.

We remember the smirks and winks that turned violence into an inside joke.

We remember January 6 — the mob in tactical gear, the gallows against a winter sky, fists and flagpoles slamming into police shields.

We remember the blood smeared across marble while a president watched it unfold like reality TV.

We remember the pardons handed out like confetti afterward.

We remember the laughter when Paul Pelosi’s skull was nearly crushed, his suffering played for laughs.

We remember Minnesota — Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, murdered. Senator John Hoffman and his wife, riddled with bullets. And we remember what followed: Senator Mike Lee pointing fingers at “Marxists” while families bled. Trump refusing even to call Governor Tim Walz. Refusing to attend the funerals. Calling it all a waste of his time. In the face of grief, they chose spite.

This did not fall out of the sky. It was cultivated. It was stoked. It was rewarded. And now the fire is devouring us all.

And while they fanned the flames, they locked every window that could have let in air. Universal background checks? Blocked. Red flag laws? Blocked. Safe storage? Blocked. Limits on weapons of war? Blocked. Again and again. Children murdered in schools, families gunned down in churches, shoppers slain in aisles — and they shrugged. They told us this was the “price of freedom.”

Charlie Kirk himself once said some deaths from gun violence were that price — the toll liberty demanded. But tell me: does Evergreen High feel like freedom? Did yesterday feel like freedom? No. It felt like fear. It felt like tyranny. It felt like a country unraveling under the weight of cruelty, a place where ballots have been traded for bullets. And still, even knowing he once excused such deaths, I say it again: Charlie Kirk did not deserve this end. None of us do.

I can hold two truths. I can say Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric was destructive, and I can say his murder is a tragedy. I can despise what he spread and still mourn the violence that took him. What I will not do is let anyone tell me that my words — my refusal to stay silent — are violence, while their incitement is patriotism.

How I wish we had a leader who could turn the temperature down. Someone capable of compassion. Someone who would stand before us and say: political violence has no place here. Ever. Oh how I wish.

Instead, we have a man who thrives on chaos, who breathes rage the way the rest of us breathe air. And behind him, a movement addicted to division because without it they are nothing. No vision. No policies. No solutions. Just grievance. Just fury. Just hunger for power at any cost.

Yesterday was a dark day for America. Not because Charlie Kirk was noble — he wasn’t — but because his violent death revealed, yet again, the sickness eating us alive: a nation where rage is currency, where violence is strategy, where every tomorrow threatens to look like yesterday.

And I am terrified of what comes next.

Because it is not just our safety on the line — it is our decency. I am afraid we are losing our capacity for compassion, our instinct for empathy, our basic humanity. I am afraid we are letting cruelty become our default setting. And if we let that happen, if we allow ourselves to become as callous as the people who celebrate this violence, then the experiment of democracy is already over.

I do not want to memorize my children’s clothes every morning, whispering a silent prayer they come home alive. I do not want their inheritance to be fear. I do not want to live in a country where every goodbye could be forever.

So hear me when I say this:

We will not be ruled by terror.

We will not be quieted by bloodshed.

We will not let democracy be dismantled by cowards who kill from the shadows.

We will not be gaslit into believing we have blood on our hands for daring to call out dangerous rhetoric. And we will not accept threats of retribution — threats that glorify cruelty and demand silence, that thirst for more violence and more war.

We will not hand our children a future where fear is the air they breathe.

We will stand in the open. We will pause. We will breathe. We will hold our children closer. Because our humanity is the one thing they cannot take unless we surrender it to them.

Because democracy is not inherited like an heirloom. It is hammered into existence by exhausted, terrified, furious people who refuse to quit.

And that is who we are.

Not the mobs. Not the executioners. Not the cowards who hide behind guns and call it strength.

We are the ones who stitch the fabric back together, thread by trembling thread. The ones who carry lanterns into rooms that reek of smoke. The ones who cradle each other when the weight of grief would crush us. The ones who insist — against every bullet, every lie, every coward’s threat — that mercy, not violence, will have the last word.

Because if Charlie Kirk’s murder teaches us anything, it is that violence is never an answer — it does not resolve a single argument, it only carves deeper scars into a nation already bleeding. And if September 11 still teaches us anything, twenty-four years later, it is that grief is a crossroads: it can harden us into cruelty, or it can soften us into kinship. I remember how, for one trembling instant, that day bound us together — strangers clutching strangers, a wounded country remembering it still had a heart. The question now is whether we will let bullets keep shredding what is left of that heart, or whether we will summon the strength to hold on to our decency, our empathy, our capacity to feel for one another before it slips away forever.

Because this is not freedom.

This is not justice.

And this is not the America we promised our children — the ones walking into classrooms with backpacks too heavy for their small shoulders, the ones who deserve a future built on safety and decency, not on blood and fear.

And I, for one, will not let violence write their future. Not now. Not ever.

And with that, today’s song.

I love you guys.

Please stay safe, stay strong, and give everyone you love an extra squeeze today. I’m sending a virtual hug to each and every one of you from me and mine.

💙 Jo