Flashback Fridays are where I look back at something I once wrote and hold it up to the light of now. In 1994, at the ripe old age of 33, I wrote this:
Words are so empty.
So much noise.
So many voices.
The message is always the same:
There is no message. Just noise.
Back then I believed words were hollow—static dressed up as meaning.
Three decades later, I see I was wrong. Words are not empty. They are sharpened into slogans, hashtags, sound bites—each one designed to wound or sanctify.
Yesterday, in The Weaponization of Grief, I wrote about how sorrow gets drafted into battle. Today, with an arrest made and the narrative already calcifying, the question cuts deeper: who owns grief?
The Father’s Act
The suspect’s father saw his son in the photographs, confronted him, and heard the admission: it was me. He called a youth pastor—someone trusted enough to stand in the breach. Together, they persuaded the young man not to end his life and handed him over to the U.S. Marshals.
It was a moment of moral clarity amid chaos: a family choosing responsibility, a pastor choosing presence, a son choosing—barely—life.
The Script Arrives on Time
From there, the playbook unrolled, as if pre-written:
A presidential tribute naming a martyr.
A Medal of Freedom promised before the body was buried.
A resolution to lay him in the Capitol Rotunda, with a statue proposed alongside it.
Flags at half-mast, vigils across cities, candles on Capitol steps.
Demands for the death penalty before charges were filed.
Generals chastising troops, cabinet secretaries issuing statements, even the guardians of secrecy and command forced to perform outrage.
Every living former president weighing in, one after another.
Grief became performance. Condemnation became choreography. Mourning was not silence but spectacle.
Noise Made Sacred
And in this noise, even violence found its own script. The bullet casings carried engravings: hey fascist, catch! bella ciao. Violence now speaks in memes. Irony carved into brass, hashtags pressed into powder.
And yet the noise is made sacred when amplified by institutions: FBI briefings, gubernatorial sermons, White House proclamations. Each one chooses which grief counts, and how it will be remembered.
Who Owns Grief?
Charlie Kirk’s death has been packaged, distributed, and assigned meaning at speed. For some, he is a hero of free speech. For others, proof of hypocrisy. For his family, he is simply gone.
Grief does not belong to presidents or platforms. It does not belong to hashtags or headlines. It belongs first to the father who turned his son in, to the pastor who held the line, to the wife and children who now wake to absence, and to the father who chose truth over denial.
I know this because I once tried to empty it myself—out of impatience, out of a younger cynicism that mistook performance for absence. But grief resists containment—whether by denial or by spectacle.
If there is defiance left, it is this: to resist the theft of grief by spectacle, to hold it in its raw, unbearable form before it calcifies into symbol—before the act of a father, quiet and unbroadcast, is drowned out by the chorus.
And so I return to those words I wrote at 33—not to dismiss them, but to rewrite them in the light of what I now know:
Words, Made to Wound
(after “Words…” 1994)
Words—
we dress them as meaning,
then fit them for war.
A body becomes a medal,
a flight plan,
a headline set to hymns.
“Historic,”
“watershed,”
“full wrath”—
the script knows its marks.
Casings talk:
“Hey fascist! Catch!”
“Bella ciao.”
A sneer for anyone still listening.
This is not remembrance.
It’s choreography.
And yet—
between the podiums and the posts,
a father makes a call.
A life is spared.
Silence—finally—means something.
I’m listening
for words that refuse the part,
for a voice that names us human
before the next shot is fired.
In 94, I was a year old! Great piece.