Reactions to the horrific murder of the young U.S. ultra-right-wing activist risk adding fuel to the fire of violence that has been sown broadly for at least 15 years now.
In the U.S., the sowers of hatred and division run rampant in a monstrous and irresponsible manner, helping to split in two a country that last united around the flag in 2001, after the Twin Towers attack. With a middle class slaughtered by unregulated globalization that has only benefited corporations who have increased their profits, frightened by uncontrolled immigration that has been artfully portrayed as a threat to American identity and cynically exploited to create fear and hoard votes by the right, with the total insipience of much of the left that has turned a blind eye to the spread of insecurity and accentuated it with the nonsense of the incultureWoke, American society has lost its compass and taken refuge in increasingly exaggerated fideisms and sectarianisms. Inconsistent Democratic leaders and Republican leaders who instead of curing the disease have exploited and exacerbated it for electoral calculations: the failure of the American political class has led to what is before our eyes. All facilitated by the extremist dynamics activated by social media whose owners make billions from algorithms built to emphasize those who stir up tempers and by fostering the reconstitution of opposing tribes in constant struggle through posts.
In the U.S., verbal violence has had an easy translation into physical violence because of the irresponsible spread of guns, defended to the hilt by Republicans and making the U.S. people the most heavily armed in the world.
It cannot escape the fact that it was a 20-year-old boy who shot Trump and it was a 22-year-old boy who killed Kirk. Leaders' bombers in the past were twice their age.
What to do. It is necessary to extinguish the fire not fuel it.
I hope that many democratic leaders will go to Kirk's funeral to testify that violence is the enemy of everyone because it is the enemy of democracy and freedom,
But I have no illusions. Nor am I under any illusion that American television stations are trying to exercise the democratic function, which is to inform and not to stir up tempers.
In our country, too, I see so many politicians and journalists ready to ride the wave with statements that increase aggression instead of bringing the fever down. All of us are in some way responsible for what has happened and what could happen again.
Let us begin by refusing to lend ourselves to this game that leads to collective suicide. Let us lay down the weapons of intolerance, verbal violence, insult, and systematic offense against those who do not think as we do.
The democracy of freedoms exists not to self-destruct, but we are all bombarding it with our keyboards turned into machine guns. The fight against violence depends on each of us. Let us not give in to the temptation to put on the element, lower ourselves into the trenches and continue to treat those who do not think like us as if they were the devil.
We know that there are cynical manipulators on the web who use and often pay people willing to spread fake news and sow the seeds of hatred. We all need to change our ways. If we fail to do so, we will be responsible for the collapse of the collective life that has hitherto allowed us to freely express our ideas and live in a civilization that we are destroying, under the smug and interested eye of dictators who are teaming up to deliver the coup de grace to the democracies that our fathers conquered fighting against the follies of Nazism, fascism and communism.
Italian 
Albanian 
English