how Will Our Children Remember This?

How many of your children saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk on their phones? Did they seek it out,or did it just appear on their feeds? If they’d never heard of Kirk before watching his gruesome murder,how did they make sense of it? Did the horrific image-I won’t describe it,because you’ve probably already seen it-burn itself into their memories?

I ask because I have two young children and spend most of my time around other parents. In the days after the videos of Kirk’s death spread across social media, I realized that most children with phones, as far as I could tell, had viewed at least one unedited version. This wasn’t likely the first disturbing video these children had encountered, of course, nor the first act of political violence that had appeared on their feeds. these same children, who are mostly between eleven and eighteen, saw the President’s bleeding ear and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of images of unfathomable trauma in Gaza. How will these already infamous scenes fall into order in their minds and coalesce into something resembling history?

Widely dispersed photos and video-the stuff we all see-are the closest thing we have to a collective, democratized history, but the connections between memories and their associated images wear thin and become increasingly unreliable. For baby boomers, those images include people standing and pointing in the direction of gunshots at a motel in Memphis, Kennedy’s exploding head, the documentary footage of crowds at Woodstock, the girl in the picture in Vietnam, the bodies at Jonestown, and so forth. As boomers have aged, those images have become a bit unmoored from their place in time, and more evocative of a feeling of rebellion and change-or whatever. I’m sure many members of that generation would tell you that they watched Kennedy get shot live on television, and would describe the terrible movement of his head, without realizing that what they were describing was…