After Charlie Kirk assassination, Scotland must stop using 'Tory' and 'Nat' as insults
We should heed the words of Bobby Kennedy, who was himself murdered, after the assassination of Martin Luther King at a time when politicians are increasingly the target of hatred
As a seven-year-old, I was confused to find my Mum peeling potatoes at the sink and crying. It was June 1968 and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy – after those of his brother JFK and Martin Luther King – had, she told me years later, seemed to plunge the world’s future into doubt.
I have experienced that feeling since: 24 years ago with 9/11 and with the 7/7 London bombings in 2005, and I felt something of it again this week.
Charlie Kirk was not someone I knew, or whose outspoken opinions I agreed with even remotely. But his murder, in the most horrific and public of ways has plunged us into trauma again. Coming in the same week as an alleged arson attack on an MP’s office, it should make us all stop and think.
I have not seen the video of the moment Kirk died and I do not want to. I am of that generation who grew up with the near-constant repetition of the Zapruder 8mm film that captured John F Kennedy’s assassination.
Society going wrong
The image of Jackie Kennedy reaching out to the secret serviceman and climbing onto the back of the president’s car is seared on my brain. So too are the images of the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, but it is the aftermath, the reaction to all three to which I believe we should look now for our example.
Yes, we must mourn the loss of a young husband and father. But we must also examine what is going wrong in our society and our own actions for what we can do better. Numerous colleagues have been threatened, their offices attacked, and their families or staff harassed.
Too often it stems from aggression we have somehow normalised. While I will always defend the right to peaceful protest, that cannot make it acceptable to terrorise passers-by. To scream in their faces or shout threatening slogans at them. And worse.
I’m always taken aback when people are surprised I have friends in other parties. That I can socialise or have a laugh with Conservative, Labour or SNP colleagues. Giving the public the impression that we are all enemies, always fighting, never finding common ground, must stop.
The language has to change. Not just in the Commons’ chamber. We must stop using Tory and Nat as insults to be traded.
‘Love and wisdom’
Many of the commentaries this past weekend have acknowledged the part that dangerous rhetoric has played in creating a dangerous atmosphere in America. I have been horrified at the hate-filled, finger-pointing statements by some, not least President Trump even though Kirk was his friend.
How different was the sentiment expressed by Bobby Kennedy in an unrehearsed, but now celebrated, speech to a crowd in Indianapolis on the night of Martin Luther King’s death: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country…”
We would do well to remember that and not just in the United States.
Christine Jardine is Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West
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