Before Charlie Kirk’s death, I had been toying with the idea of writing about algorithms, about which I know nothing. I thought I might learn something by writing, a common experience for many of us who sit down to find words for what’s running around in our heads.
Since Charlie Kirk’s death, I have been trying to get a handle on what’s happening to us, trying to understand the event and the outraged surprise being expressed by people who vote differently than I do. It seemed as if they were totally unaware of the impacts of the hate-mongering coming from their side of the social continental divide. “Don’t touch it,” said friends who lean that direction, without explaining why, as if I didn’t know.
So I’m going back to algorithms, about which I know nothing. I never understood the term even in high school math, so I got out my trusty old Webster’s Dictionary to find out what it used to mean. The single definition is “any special method of solving a certain kind of problem; specif., the repetitive calculations used in finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers (called in full Euclid’s algorithm).” Now, doesn’t that help?
But how that translates to the algorithms being discussed today is beyond me. It’s beyond me in the same way that computers are beyond me, and the internet is beyond me, and the unanticipated consequences of new technologies being promoted today are beyond me, from lithium mining and what to do with used-up solar panels to the energy requirements of AI and its impacts on our minds. I used to think I understood some ways we might make a better future for us, ways to live sustainably on this planet. Now, with algorithms doing most, if not all of our thinking, it’s hard not to just give up.
I want to put out a risky hypothesis: that gun violence is, in fact, a kind of algorithm. If it repeats often enough, we’ll find our common denominator. It was interesting, perhaps also sad that right after Charlie Kirk’s death, not one cry for gun control arose from the bereaved. Instead, threats of the death penalty, which the holy state of Utah still maintains, were thrust forward. My friends on the other side were voracious for the capture of the perpetrator, who appears to have used a bolt rifle, not a military assault weapon meant to take out the masses—meaning the guy was a sharpshooter. A single shot was all it took, although now there are stories of bullet casings (plural) found at the site. After the suspect’s capture, the horror that he was a Utah native, not some left-leaning outsider, further unraveled the right(eous).
So here we have a common divisor. When someone is so moved by the political violence being done in our supposedly democratic country, so moved to commit murder, albeit from the distance a gun of any kind allows, we have a serious problem on our hands. The whole idea of a democracy is to have laws and a legal system to resolve our differences, not fisticuffs, assassinations or revolution. When the guns come out to keep political differences at bay, we’re all in trouble.
Since Charlie Kirk’s death, others have spoken more eloquently to this question than I am able to do. One was a U.S. Capitol security guard attacked in the January 6th riots, who experienced first-hand the violence of people who wanted to kill him just for doing his job. Inflamed by Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the supposedly stolen election, the crowd was crazy, not patriotic. The craziness of hate is what we have to guard against. The insanity of having guns available to anyone regardless of their craziness makes us weak, not strong.
But I sense that, in fact, the real perpetrator is an algorithm somewhere in the ether that captures the attention, then encourages, instructs, and guides young people to take the leap right over the edge, after they leave a few traces on social media for their friends to know what they are sacrificing for the country. Algorithms are making a few people blasphemously rich, while the rest of us are invisibly under assault.
Father, forgive us. We know not what we do.
Trudy Wischemann is a real populist who uses words, not guns, to do her fighting. You can send her your thoughts on our national crises c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
