A Candle Against the Dark
- Rich Washburn
- Sep 14
- 2 min read
I’ve been thinking a lot about light lately. How fragile it feels. How easily it gets swallowed by the dark.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination on September 10th wasn’t just a man cut down. It was a light extinguished in front of our eyes — a voice that carried across campuses, across generations, silenced mid-sentence.
And yet, here’s what’s happened since: the world has filled with candles.
Not riots. Not burning cars. Candles.
Candlelight vigils in small towns and big cities. Murals painted
overnight. A haka in New Zealand. Streets in Europe lit up with crowds holding signs, holding flowers, holding silence. Online, millions posting that plain white shirt with one word across the chest: FREEDOM.
This is what it looks like when people refuse to let darkness win.
The Line
There’s a line that divides all of us — not left or right, not ideology, but human and inhuman. On one side, people who know instinctively that you don’t celebrate murder. On the other, those who do.
That’s what’s been laid bare this week. The vast, overwhelming majority of humanity is standing on the side that says: no more.
Charlie’s life isn’t worth more than anyone else’s. He’d tell you that himself. But the way he lived — minute by minute, giving everything he had to the mission of waking people up — makes his death a mirror we can’t ignore.
The Turning Point Within
Every generation has its “shot heard around the world.” Sometimes it’s the crack of a musket. Sometimes it’s the thunder of a march. This time, it was a single bullet that tried to silence an idea.
But ideas don’t die so easily.
Charlie’s life is now stitched into the fabric of history. He belongs to that lineage of people who gave everything for something bigger — the Gandhis, the Kings, the Founders. The ones we point to when we teach our children what sacrifice looks like.
And for the rest of us? This is our turning point too. A moment to decide whether we fuel the darkness or light a candle against it.
Candles don’t last forever. They burn down, they flicker, they fade. But in their brief life, they hold back the dark. That’s their power. That’s their testimony.
Charlie’s candle burned bright and burned out too soon. But look around: millions of new flames are being lit in his honor. A sea of small, defiant lights.
And maybe that’s the point. Maybe his life was the spark. Maybe the rest is up to us. Because in the end, history won’t just remember the shot that killed him.
History will remember how we answered it.
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