Dear GOP. I truly hope Charlie Kirk is in heaven right now.

Charlie Kirk was “my brother”. Not a favorite. But I recognize his human soul, and I hope he is in heaven already. I don’t feel qualified to judge, and I don’t often feel the desire to try. I imagine his spouse knew his best sides — and perhaps also his worst — better than most, but she isn’t really in a position to “judge” either. Regardless, it is a terrible, sudden loss for the children and spouse; and any other family members.
Like the Paul Simon song “Graceland” says,

"Losing love is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you're blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow"…
“I may be obliged to defend every love, every ending
Or maybe there's no obligations now
Maybe I've a reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland…”

I don’t feel qualified to judge but — Gosh, what a narrow mind! Was there any truth in pieces of what he said? Didn’t he intentionally distort his words into shards of glass that pierced the skin of innocent strangers? Didn’t he burden the already over-burdened, and lead astray young listeners? What will be the ultimate consequences of his choices, and of his death? — was he the least-bad version of himself? Who knows.

People do horrible things; and sometimes they do small-bad things that have huge consequences, and sometimes they do huge-bad things that end up having few consequences. One man did a bad thing to murder Charlie Kirk in cold blood in front of a large crowd of impressionable young people. Murder, with the very narrow exception of defense of innocents, is always a huge bad thing, whether committed by a neurotic young man with unclear motives, a hired hit man, or a policeman with poor George Floyd’s neck under his knee.

In the end, I imagine we each find ourselves face-to-face with the lifelong consequences of our choices — the pain that we caused others with words or deeds. For some — very few — this might be too large of a darkness to bear, and they are simply put out of their misery by a benevolent God. But I imagine that — for most — it would be a time of awakening or an instantly absorbed education. So yes, GOP, I hope your hero is in heaven’s entryway inside the pearly gates, having his reckoning, and learning a Truth of it, a vision that none of us can fully grasp from our time-trapped perspectives.

”Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it,” as Robert Redford’s character in ‘A River Runs Through It’ says, quoting from an essay on which the movie was based. A merged river has always seemed like an unsatisfying afterlife — what, we lose our identities? — but in recent years, I have begun to perceive that our continued existence as individual souls in a timeless space is no more irrational than simply observing that a circle that moves through time creates a 3-D cylinder or sphere or torus (donut), yet maintains the sum of its moments / snapshots of circle-hood. We already perceive ourselves as living in 3.5 dimensions, don’t we? Three spatial dimensions, plus forward-only in time? When all things merge into one, a reckoning of how we fell short is a logical, necessary pain as we find our place in how we fit into the permanent state of things.

Incidentally, and of course, I recognize George Floyd’s human soul too. If there is a heaven, Charlie Kirk may be listening a lot right now to George Floyd, and others like him, to absorb the Truth of the victims of racism, to reckon with the pain that his choices caused both before and after his passing. Maybe the reckoning takes just a minute, or maybe there’s ‘no obligations now’; the great story of life is handed to us as an unearned gift. Hope so.

But I do believe that there won’t be any room to make claims about the inferiority of any group of human beings, and there will be a humbling of those who tried to claim superiority. The price of learning the truth will be the exposure of our own truth, for nothing can be hidden when all life merges into one, or as Margaret Wise Brown perceived, when we finally can see that we separate islands are all one island, under the water.