The Devil's Chickens
When Violence Comes Home to Roost
“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
A Necessary Preface
What follows operates in the space between tragedy and pattern recognition, where conventional moral frameworks prove insufficient to hold simultaneous truths. This is not celebration but archaeological work—examining the architecture of American violence at the moment it consumes one of its architects.
Charlie Kirk was killed yesterday while literally answering a question about mass shootings. The irony exceeds our language for containing it. We lack the words for when someone’s talk of “acceptable deaths” becomes their own death sentence, delivered not by karma or justice but by the very machinery they helped construct.
This essay requires readers capable of holding multiple registers simultaneously: recognition of the real human loss two daughters now face, recognition that violence refuses to honor the boundaries its advocates imagine, and acknowledgment that pointing out these patterns is neither celebration nor justification but a form of witness our moment demands.
Those seeking simple condemnation or vindication should read elsewhere. This piece exists where American violence meets American amnesia, where our rhetoric about acceptable losses meets the unacceptable loss of any human life, where chickens always come home to roost—even for those who believed they were exempt.
If you cannot simultaneously acknowledge the injustice of children losing their father while recognizing he would not have acknowledged yours, if you cannot hold horror at violence while acknowledging its predictable patterns, if you cannot see how grief itself has been partitioned along political lines in America—this essay will exceed your interpretive framework.
Read only if you can bear the weight of irony that refuses resolution and forces us to confront what we have built—especially when it kills its own architects.
