2025.09.11: The Cycle

Trying to die.

The only winning of days not to die.

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Morning to you, wherever you are, because it is Morning Somewhere!

For September 11th, 2025.

My name is

Bernie Burns.

Sitting right over there.

Say hi to Ashley, buddy.

It's Ashley Burns.

Good morning.

It's streaming.

It is.

It's

been a lot going on this morning.

Obviously, the big news, which is weird to say, on the anniversary of September 11th is that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed last night at a college event in Utah.

Yeah, Charlie Kirk a right-wing influencer, is how you describe him?

So some people would say he's conservative values, pushing Christian values, and other people would say that he is a guy who stirred up a lot of hatred towards disenfranchised groups and a lot of xenophobia and things like that yeah so he was uh he was speaking um at uh the Utah Valley University uh campus yesterday and I mean I haven't watched the videos of this I just I can't make myself watch the videos um but I guess he was shot in the neck uh and later pronounced dead.

It's weird.

They they arrested someone for it initially, but they've now let that person go and the suspect remains at large.

It's one of those things that always happens.

Even when the Minnesota state representatives were shot, actually, Melissa Hortman was killed and her husband was killed and their dog.

It sparked the biggest manhunt in the history of Minnesota trying to find the person.

It's always one of those things you think, especially something that took place at a public event, there would be a lot of people around who could see it, but it's just mayhem.

Like even in today's day and age, I've seen two angles of it, which seem to be the two angles that are out there.

I'm sure there's more overnight.

But in this world where everyone is recording everything all the time, and I'm sure there was a production crew that worked for Charlie Kirk that was recording all that as well.

It's kind of shocking how sometimes people can get away with things in broad daylight, literally.

Yeah, almost like there's so much surveillance that anything could happen.

Right.

And so they're, yeah, the suspect still.

Like you'd be able to recreate them in 3D space of where they went and every step they took from that point on it's just a factor of time even when they were announcing charlie kirk's condition

it was announced that he was in critical condition and every comment i read was they're just saying that like anybody who saw the video saw that he was very unlikely to have survived the event and that they were saying until they could basically inform all of his you know, loved ones and family members and things like that, they're going to announce that he's in critical condition.

But I don't think anybody believed it who saw it.

No, I know, I don't think many people did.

And

it's caused a real firestorm of emotion, I'd say, from everyone, regardless.

If you highly disliked Charlie Kirk, if you really liked what Charlie Kirk had to say, everyone feels something very strong.

about this event.

And as a result of the event as well, a lot of quotes from Charlie Kirk are circulating or recirculating as people deal with a lot of, I feel like very conflicted emotions in this regard.

A lot of people who disagreed with Charlie Kirk on

a sort of a moral and political level are going over some of the quotes that he's had before,

trying to figure out how, like, how conflicted to feel, right?

You know, he's said in the past that he thinks that gun deaths are worth it.

I'll read the quote here from him, just so we have, you know, we're reporting this accuracy.

I thought you had an interesting take on this.

The quote that's most widely being thrown around right now is one that he said on April 5th of 2023

in regards to gun deaths.

I think it's worth it.

I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.

And so people are saying, you know, obviously now he is the victim of a gun death.

And so people are using that as a way to say, like, he would be okay with this, I suppose, if he had said this before.

Right.

Like I don't need to feel bad about this because he wouldn't feel bad about this.

You know, and so

in the past, he's also, I believe, said empathy is like a is a woke construct and he doesn't believe in it.

So people are

looking at that as well, saying, well, he wouldn't even want me to feel empathy for him.

Right.

And it's a way, you know, to sort of comfort ourselves when something terrible happens to someone that you don't like.

Right.

And you, I thought, had a good take on this.

We were in the car talking about it.

And I'm going to paraphrase what you said, unless you want to say it, which is you said, if you're going to use his own quote against him, then you're almost giving justification of the quote itself.

It's almost like showing in some level that you agree with the quote.

Yeah, so I guess my stance on it is that

if you disagree with him saying that gun deaths are worth it, right?

Like if you say gun deaths are never worth it, gun deaths are never acceptable, then when he suffers a gun death, we can't agree with him for that one occasion, but disagree with all the other ones.

I don't think that a gun death is ever a good thing.

You're saying the gotcha is not worth what you're giving up to say this.

Yeah, like, like, I'm, I don't want to measure myself by his ruler.

Just this one, just this one time.

I'm not going to measure myself by his ruler.

I have my own ruler, and that's what I will measure myself by.

And it needs to measure equally.

That's a good way to put it, I think.

Yeah, because I mean, of course, there's a lot of people who would say if you stir these kinds of emotions in people, eventually it's going to land somewhere.

The main thing that I've been thinking about in the last 12 hours has really been just the

human quality of empathy and how it might be the quality that has the greatest degree of variance among people.

And I want to say really quickly how much I appreciate the discussion that's taking place in the Morning Subwear subreddit because I went in there.

Reddit's not a place that's really known for reasonable discussion.

For a lot of like nuanced nuanced takes.

And it's interesting.

Like, I

hate to even call stuff like this out because I'll get to it in a second, but I understand where some of these emotions come from.

But like, even on the announcements on some of the big subreddits where they announce his death, there's like a lot of people giving awards to it, like happy awards or whatever.

Celebrating.

Really, though, I can't help but back off and look at that.

It's like, you know, a guy said terrible things, was shot and killed in public in front of a bunch of people.

So let's give some money to Reddit Reddit to show our happiness from this.

Like somebody, Reddit's making money from that.

I don't know why.

That just feels weird to me.

It does feel weird.

It does feel weird.

And, you know, and one of the big things that I see a lot when people are discussing this is trying to sort out a lot of emotion and figure out where to put their empathy.

Right.

And maybe, maybe, as you say, there is a huge variance of

empathy just like across the spectrum of people.

And Charlie Kirk may have not been a big believer in empathy, but I actually am.

I'm a big believer in empathy.

Like, I can be sad that this guy was violently murdered

in this public space, which, you know, not only is causing a lot of effect for his family, but also everyone who was there.

Everyone who was there.

It's a horrible video, by the way.

It's, you know, I'm

not going to watch it.

I saw a video of people running and that was like, that was enough for me.

I'm very, I'm very delicate with that sort of stuff these days.

No.

Like, emotionally, I have a hard time handling it.

I used to feel that

you almost had an obligation to watch those videos.

When the internet came around, suddenly we were all exposed to these like really horrific videos, especially.

I mean, live leak.

Yeah, you know, and things like, especially like prisoners of war and stuff like that.

And I always felt when I was younger, I felt like when people would say, oh, I don't want to watch that.

It's like, that person actually went through that.

Like they, they had to experience that in real life.

And you're sitting here like connected to it via war or something on some like watered down level.

You're connected to this and you're, you get to sit there and say, Oh, I don't want to look at that.

It would make me feel bad or whatever when somebody else actually went through it.

But it would make me feel bad.

No, I get it.

I get it, I get it.

This is when I was younger, I felt that way.

I don't feel that way anymore.

I do understand the idea, though, right?

That like this person went through this, the least I can do is bear witness.

It's almost like when you go through driver's ed and they make you watch these terrible videos, it once again goes back to empathy.

Sometimes people need empathy dropped in their lap.

Yeah, one of the things that for me,

you know, as we discuss empathy and its place in, I guess, how we feel about events like this, I go back to empathy as, I mean, one of the cornerstones of civilization.

Very famously, there was a speaker, an anthropologist,

I want to say her name was Margaret Mead.

I'll look it up, but who said in a lecture that one of the earliest signs of civilization was a healed femur.

It was a healed leg bone.

This was someone who had broken a leg and it had healed while they were alive, right?

And that that was one of the first hallmarks of the beginnings of civilized society, right?

This is someone who was grievously injured and, if left to their own devices, would almost certainly have died.

Should have been the end of their story.

You wouldn't be able to get food.

You would very likely get infections.

You're not going to be able to get to a water source.

You're not going to be able to

build shelters easily with a broken leg, right?

So someone else had at probably cost to themselves, shared food, had taken care of this person long enough for this bone to heal, right?

Someone had given of themselves to another person to heal that person.

And that that is at its core an empathetic act, right?

Taking care of someone else and seeing someone else as worth.

the personal sacrifice.

And so I think that empathy is actually as humans one of the greatest qualities that we could strive for

and i think too it's some people just have it in them inherently i think that some people can develop it just by hearing and learning about other people's experiences

another degree is some people develop empathy if they experience things directly themselves you know having it dropped in their lap essentially

you know, through some traumatic event or something like that.

And then there's a whole other group of people who just shoo it away at every possible opportunity.

And so when I read the conversation that was taking place in our subreddit, I see people who are were feel like they were hurt by Charlie Kirk and they are taking an opportunity, a difficult opportunity to express empathy.

And I

admire those people who can do that.

I greatly admire those people.

And then there's other people who don't want to take the time to feel empathy or extend empathy.

And those people, I get it.

I really do.

I get it.

You know what I mean?

It's someone who, you know, said things that were designed to hurt you, you know, and they felt like they were being attacked or that there was this wave being built against them.

So I get it when they don't want to, when they don't want to show empathy.

I don't understand it.

It's so interesting to me that this is occurring, this conversation on September 11th, because my own experience with empathy was I got, I was a not a young young man, but I was mid-20s when 9-11 happened.

And

man, I was so

angry about it.

And I think I can very easily put myself back in those shoes emotionally of how I was 24 years ago

and how I felt afterwards.

I mean, I'm talking for months.

And I came through it.

You know what I mean?

And it was.

It was a period where I was very angry.

I'm not proud of the anger that I had, but I'm proud of the fact that I came through the other side of that.

Right.

But a lot of that, you didn't do that overnight.

Charlie Kirk didn't seem to be a very empathetic person himself, right?

And do we extend empathy to someone who did not extend it to anyone, seemingly?

I don't know.

And also,

another thing we'll never know is, did he, did he have a moment of empathy?

Because like sometimes you have a traumatic event, you know, and in the seconds before he died.

Did he regret his stance on Gundas, that kind of thing?

Right.

Did it seem like just an unfortunate statistic when it was him that was experiencing it, you know?

And I feel exceptionally bad for his kids, you know, who's your dad can be the center of your universe.

And if your dad is this guy who can show up at a college campus and thousands of people, for one reason or another,

show up to watch him talk, you know, these young kids, it's like, how are they going to cope with that going forward?

You know, you don't pick your parents, but, you know, these kids are going to be dealing with this for a long time.

And like you said, all the people who were there and had to witness this firsthand.

And then there's the other factor of where do we go from here?

You know, just the other day, we were talking about this new metric for how many degrees away from boiling are we?

And boy, what a week to talk about.

Yeah, I was going to say, do we need to turn that meter up a little bit?

I would say that this definitely went up a degree or two, regardless of wherever we are.

I just come back to cycles.

I always see cycles and things.

And,

you know,

you can see it time and time again in history, especially modern history, last hundred years,

where the world just gets whipped into a frenzy.

And it's qualities like nationalism

or greed or just good old-fashioned xenophobia that

we don't like these people because they are different from us

in some way.

We're scared of them or we hate them and we don't want them.

And it leads to conflicts that all seem very justified at the time.

And then the end of that cycle is an incredible period of violence.

At the end of it all, it seems like the same conclusion is always reached.

Violence and death, that's the real enemy.

You know, that's the thing that we never want to go back to again.

And those people come to terms with that.

And they all almost every time say the same thing.

Never again, never again.

We'll never allow this to happen again.

Our kids will never have to go through this.

This is the last great war.

This is the war to end all wars and things like that.

And they reach that conclusion.

We watch them reach that conclusion time and time again.

And yet something happens.

Well,

I know exactly what happens and it's time, right?

Time continues and you get a generation removed and then you get two generations removed and you read about that terrible time in history books, but it's just that.

It's history.

It's far away, right?

History is something that happens to the unwise who came before you, who are very wise.

And so you have that disconnect.

You know about it.

You know that it it happened and that it

existed and it's it's part of the past, but it's just that it's the past.

You don't have any sort of like gut

relation to it, right?

It didn't happen to you.

It didn't happen to anyone you know.

That's empathy, right?

Right.

Yeah, but it happened so long ago that it's like, it's, it's almost like a fairy tale, right?

It's real, of course, but you.

You don't have any sort of personal connection anymore.

It's different when it's on your doorstep versus when it's on the pages pages of a history book, right?

And how many times do we have to go through it before it eventually does stick?

And it does feel like we're in a cycle where, you know, things are becoming more violent all the time.

And that's what we're talking about with the boiling pot.

So I don't know what to say

about the death of Charlie Kirk.

I'll just say that I regret that he didn't live long enough to where we could have seen a redemption arc, see him turn away from some of the hateful stuff that he had said, some of the emotions he had stirred in other people,

and to, you know, follow more in the footsteps of Christ, which he seemed to talk a lot about and, you know, have empathy for other people, have empathy for people who had a different condition of life than you have.

I regret that he didn't live long enough to see that.

That does it for us today, September 11th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.