Thoughts, Prayers, and Profits

On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and a prominent conservative activist, was shot and killed while speaking at an outdoor event in Utah. I hated his politics. His racist, misogynistic rhetoric did real harm. But I was appalled that his life was ended by gun violence. The tragedy isn’t just the loss of life, it’s the erosion of a space where even toxic ideas should be challenged without bloodshed.

The irony is brutal: just two years before his death, Kirk said, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Here’s the thing. When children are killed in school shootings, the dominant conservative response is grief, prayer, and resistance to reform—framing action as “politicizing tragedy.” But when someone like Kirk is targeted, the response shifts: swift condemnation, manhunts, and demands for justice. The contrast is stark.

This song isn’t about one man. It’s about the machinery of selective grief, the politics of outrage, and the cost we’ve normalized in the name of “freedom.” I didn’t write it to comfort. I wrote it to confront the rituals we repeat after every shooting—and the silence that follows when the victims aren’t rich, white, or politically useful.

My frustration runs deeper than hypocrisy. It’s about the emotional toll of watching horrific violence become routine. Go almost anywhere else in the world—this is not normal.

Verse
Shots ring out prepare the graves
Candles, hashtags, prayers in waves
Grief is staged and televised
No one sees through all the lies
When will life be sacred
Is it only in the womb?
Or when the voices of the dead
Only spoke of gloom?
 
Chorus
The outrage all depends
On who was in the room
Some grief gets a motorcade
Some grief gets a broom
“Don’t politicize the moment” 
“Not the time to criticize” 
Just send your thoughts and prayers
Unless the victim’s monetized

Verse
In Texas, nineteen sixty-six
The first in modern memory
Fifteen graves were needed then
A nation mourned collectively
But as the years moved forward fast
The shots grew louder still
The nation plugged its ears with cash 
And bowed to profit’s will

Chorus
The outrage all depends
On who was in the room
Some grief gets a motorcade
Some grief gets a broom
“Don’t politicize the moment” 
“Not the time to criticize” 
Just send your thoughts and prayers
Unless the victim’s monetized

Bridge
One death gets the focus
And attention to provoke us
If the ideology is right
And the victim is all white
Grief measured out by politics
Makes victims of us all

Outro
He said it’s worth the children’s lives
Lost to the bullet’s fury
Because he said, that owning guns 
Is more important, surely
And now he’s gone, a sacrifice 
Would he still call it worth the price?