This is Scott Carrier, sitting on my front porch in Salt Lake City.

Last time, I said I was going to go look for some creativity or inspiration.

And so I went fishing for a week up in my favorite mountains, and it worked.

I forgot all about the problems of the world,

felt like a new man, happy to be alive. But then I came back down from the mountains, and Charlie

Kirk was shot at the university where I used to work from the top of the building where I had an

office I almost never went to.

Back then, over a decade ago, lots of students at this school were carrying guns in their

backpacks. I asked one, why do you bring a gun to class? And he said, to fight evil. And I said, in school, we learned how to fight evil

with words, not guns. He said nothing, but the look on his face was like he wanted to shoot me,

like I was evil. Charlie Kirk thought he was teaching students how to fight evil with words.

That was his purpose in speaking at the university,

but a student from another school thought Kirk was spreading hatred,

that Kirk was evil and needed to be killed.

It's all very confusing and kind of scary. Now the flags around town are flying at

half-mast and people are saying Kirk is a Christian martyr like Joan of Arc and that Democrats and

liberals are evil. I know I should be out talking to people about what's happening to our country,

but I also know I don't want to hear what they'll say. Not yet, anyway. So I'm going to play this

piece by Charles Bowden that seems to sum up what's happening now, even though he wrote it 30 years

ago in a book called Blood

Orchid. He called it a response or a riff on Imagine, the song by John Lennon.

Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is

...