I see it as the opposite. Every act of violence just weaponizes the next generation toward someone to hate. If they grow up in a world where they think their dad was a martyr, we just end up with more people who continue his work. It's a small scale "every time we drop a bomb on another country, we extend how long that country hates us." Which, today of all days... y'know. We need more situations like Musk's kids disowning and shaming him in public. But as we've said multiple times already, sometimes someone invites the consequences of their own actions and what else can we do but acknowledge it.
Was it in this thread or somewhere else I saw that two people who worked tirelessly to remove helmet safety laws for motorcycles in their states died in motorcycle crashes? Only in this case it's not a kid growing up and thinking "if my dad had worn a helmet he'd still be here," but rather someone killed my dad and the big orange man said it's because of trans people" or whatever fucked up narrative our country will give to it.
I don't at all disagree about the first part- violence begets violence more often than not. But at the same time, all it takes is one person who wants to break the cycle. Yeah, I know, that sounds hippy-dippy and whatnot, and it's never
quite that simple, but in some ways it is. Every action, however small, ends up effecting and inspiring others. One less person willing to resort to violence can make a big change. Obviously there's still endless amounts of violence going on, but the butterfly effect of any one given person is almost impossible to quantify sometimes.
We're not gonna know how his kids skew for quite a while. Obviously their childhood is going to be filled with people close to their parents telling them what a good man their father was. With any luck, once they reach an age where they can think for themselves, they'll start to see that what their father said and stood for harmed many people, not just their father. I'm sure his daughter will see the video of her father saying that she'd be forced to give birth if she were raped as a 10 year old. She'll see what her father really thought of her, and while my heart goes out to her- what a godawful thing to hear your father say about you- I hope that it'll allow her some good from the bad by freeing herself of her father's views. He's not some saint because he was murdered for his views; that would be like saying Hitler was a saint because his death stopped a war.
Not trying to center myself in all this, but for example- violence and mental illness and addiction of all sorts run in my family- it has for quite a while, and for a long time, everyone just seemed to accept that it was their fate as well. But in the last generation or so, they've made active strides to acknowledge the bad, the harm it was doing to all involved, and do their part to end the cycle. We're not perfect, of course- we mess up more often than not, but we acknowledge what came before and the damage it's done, and we're doing everything we can to, at the very least, not pass that on to the next generation, and if we do, lessen it as much as we can.
It's never that clean cut, granted, and it takes a strong person to be able to step outside themselves and see what their actions are doing to others, and not everyone is willing or able to do it. I can only hope that by the time his kids are old enough to think for themselves- a decade or more away- we'll have made
some strides, however small, toward curbing some of this violence and hate. I think even moreso than the death itself, I think we should be focusing on
why and
how the death occurred and
what the takeaway is or should be.
