Plato, 9/11, & Charlie Kirk

Yesterday, Tuesday, September 9th 2025, I sat down and finished reading Plato’s Phaedo. On Monday, my class discussed Crito, and the Friday before, The Apology. Anyone familiar with Plato should recognize these three texts as a sort of trilogy, the last dialogues of the end of the life of Socrates. The Apology outlines Socrates’ defense of his actions in court, upon being accused of monotheism, atheism, and corrupting the youth. After he is unjustly found guilty of these crimes, Crito details his conversation with a friend in prison, and his decision to remain in Athens and face the death penalty. Phaedo, the longest, is Socrates’ very last conversation, and ends with his drinking of the poison, falling hopefully into death.

            Today, Wednesday, September 10th 2025, I drove home from class, having just discussed Phaedo, and sat down to begin writing a weekly paper on a different Platonic dialogue. Moments before beginning, at 1:48 PM, I received word about Charlie Kirk’s assassination attempt, and was instantly glued to my phone. For the next two hours I refreshed AP and listened to ABC, until President Trump made the announcement that he’d succumbed to the gunshot wound in his neck. I’d watched all the angles, been sickened by each one, and when his death was made official, I cried for a long time. 

            Now, in just a few hours, it will be September 11th, 2025, marking 24 years since the 9/11 attacks. Though I was not alive in 2001, I am a very patriotic American, and remembering this day means a lot to me. I take pride in my great hope and optimism for this country, and for me, 9/11 marks two things: 1) a time where the majority of Americans, both Democrat and Republican, were united in shock, grief, rage, and pride for their country, but 2) the end of 20th century optimism; a hope that technology, science, and medicine, would unite the children of the world in a new Earth utopia (to put it colorfully).

            These fantastic United States, and I mean the people, not some magical, abstract, governmental being, tore free of Britain, dug a massive canal through Panama, invented the lightbulb, the telephone, airplanes, paved the interstates, put human beings on the moon, robots on other planets, and connected the entire world with the Internet. But they also enslaved millions, witnessed countless shootings, and put a bullet in Charlie Kirk’s neck. What do we do with this? Can you be selectively patriotic? Can you love your country, and the people within it, but exclude the bad parts? Don’t they count as American?

            It’s sometimes hard being patriotic. Sometimes it even feels inappropriate—Charlie Kirk’s murderer was a shameless, evil, spineless coward, who went against everything a real American like Kirk stood for. But he was still an American, from an American city, living in an American house, and probably attended an American school. So what?

            Better yet, what is patriotism? Is it just a love, or is it an obligation? If it’s love, do you get to choose its object? Is it the American land, or the big cities, or the people, or the American dream, or maybe just some blue-and-red “UNITED STATES” nameplate floating on a map, without any particulars? Should you love a country, and convince yourself it’s the best one, simply because you happen to live in it, even when it does wrong, commits evil? A country that kills a man for sitting and speaking into a microphone?

            These questions were bouncing around my head while I was driving, and I suddenly starting thinking again about Socrates. Socrates died while doing what he did best: talking. Not just speaking nonsense, but sense, reason, truth; his aim in life was to be wise and good, and share this pursuit with those around him. His opposers accused him of corrupting the youth, putting false ideas in their heads; but Socrates did not stop. With lies and unfair accusations, they finally got their hands on him, sentenced him to death, and still Socrates did not budge; his role was to speak, and spread truth. Moments before his last breath, he spoke still. The day of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was an odd day indeed to discuss Phaedo, because Kirk, while probably not as profound as Socrates himself, was in a very similar situation. A man sits peacefully in a busy public square, and has conversations. Dead. While only one man gunned down Kirk, versus the 280 jurors that voted against Socrates, thousands more on social media celebrate the shooting as a national holiday.

            How could you ever love a place, a community, that would do such a thing? What kind of a disgusting and insensitive human being would you need to be to feel patriotic during a time like this?

            But wait. Even while sitting in prison, Socrates was not angry. Believing his submission to an unjust execution to be the virtuous action, he tells Crito the following, speaking words he believes the laws would proclaim:

Do you think you have this right to retaliation against your country and its laws? That if we undertake to destroy you and think it right to do so, you can undertake to destroy us, as far as you can, in return? And will you say that you are right to do so, you who truly care for virtue? Is your wisdom such as not to realize that your country is to be honored more than your mother, your father, and all your ancestors, that it is more to be revered and more sacred, and that it counts for more among the gods and sensible men, that you must worship it, yield to it and placate its anger more than your father’s? You must either persuade it or obey its orders, and endure in silence whatever it instructs you to endure, whether blows or bonds, and if it leads you into war to be wounded or killed, you must obey. To do so is right, and one must not give way or retreat or leave one’s post, but both in war and in courts and everywhere else, one must obey the commands of one’s city and country, or persuade it as to the nature of justice. It is impious to bring violence to bear against your mother or father; it is much more so to use it against your country.

And further,

We have given you birth, nurtured you, educated you; we have given you and all other citizens a share of all the good things we could. Even so, by giving every Athenian the opportunity, once arrived at voting age and having observed the affairs of the city and us the laws, we proclaim that if we do not please him, he can take his possessions and go wherever he pleases.

            Socrates believed that by choosing your country (not fleeing to Canada or to Mexico) and by partaking in its goods, you are agreeing to obey its rule, as you would obey your parents. My point in quoting this passage is not specifically Socrates’ justification for submitting to his execution, but rather to show that even when presented with a blatant injustice committed by Athens, he still felt loyalty to his country, and believed this loyalty to be just. As Socrates raised the glass of hemlock to his mouth, he had hope for Athens, that they would eventually come to the truth he sought to share with the youth. Charlie Kirk had hope in his final moments, or he would not have been speaking. So too must we have hope that the end of Kirk’s life is not the end of our country; it’ll take a lot more than one bullet to kill the American dream. Thus, whatever patriotism means to you, don’t give it up yet.

This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world. – President Bush, 9/11/01, 8:30 PM EDT.

Charles James Kirk was a Christian martyr. He died a missionary, evangelizing America’s youth as a modern-day Socratic figure and a herald of common sense and cold hard truth. He represents the best and bravest of us, and the last thing he would want is a loss of hope in the redemption of the United States of America.