I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately, for reasons that are all too understandable. But death was never a stranger to me or to most country people. Out in the sticks, you learn early that life is fragile. We raised chicks and chickens, but predators and neighbors’ dogs often got to them first. My calf Boots ended up as steaks one hard winter when money was tight. (Lesson learned: Never name an animal that might end up on the dinner table.)
Killing was my responsibility, too, when it came to snakes, because they ate the baby animals I was trying to protect — chickens, kittens, puppies, even the occasional peacock or duck. And like many farm kids, I buried more than my share of family: three grandparents and two uncles were gone before I reached high school. By the time I was an adult, death was no stranger.
That’s the world I knew — and it’s a far cry from life in the cities, where death is hidden behind hospital curtains and shrink-wrapped in the grocery store. Many urban leftists have never seen a person die, never dressed game, never buried an animal they raised. Chicken nuggets come from a factory, and Granny is in the urn on the mantel. To them, death is abstract. To us, it was real.
And that difference matters. Because when you don’t see death, you start to treat it as a concept instead of a fact. It becomes something symbolic — a narrative tool, a cultural weapon, even a punchline. You see it all the time online: A person urban leftists hate dies or is attacked, and the celebration starts. Memes, hashtags, jokes. To the insulated, death isn’t the end of a life; it’s just another piece of content.
Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to have a more intimate relationship with death. Military veterans have seen friends fall in combat or killed enemies themselves. Police and EMTs walk into violent scenes where people are bleeding out, dying under their hands. Farmers and hunters see life taken to put food on the table. These experiences don’t make us numb. They make us sober. Death isn’t an abstraction; it’s a reality that humbles and scars.
There are two ways humans have always learned to understand death: storytelling and experience. Experience is the most effective — nothing compares to sitting with a dying parent, holding a stillborn child, or watching a comrade fall in battle. Those moments burn death’s reality into the soul in a way that no lecture ever could. But that’s not something we can give another person. Short of, God forbid, a shooting war or something similar, granting that experience is usually beyond our control.
Storytelling, however, is different. It’s the one tool we all have. From Homer’s Iliad to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, from pioneer diaries to modern war memoirs, stories have always been humanity’s way of bringing the fact of death close to those who haven’t yet faced it. A well-told story slips under the guard of ideology and abstraction. It makes you feel what the writer or witness felt: the grief, the weight, the silence of a life cut short.
The Call to Arms: Tell the Stories
If the left treats death as a meme, then our answer has to be stories — real ones, shared person to person. And there are practical ways to do this:
Use cultural touchstones. Remind people of stories they already know — Mufasa in The Lion King, Dumbledore in Harry Potter, Tony Stark in Avengers: Endgame. These moments broke hearts across the spectrum. Even though they are fiction, they remind even the insulated that death means something.
Frame stories through empathy, not politics. Lead with the human side — “let me tell you about the night my dog died” — and only later draw the political connection. Empathy has to come first, or nothing else gets through.
Lean on universal losses. Pets, especially, are shared ground. If someone admits, “I cried when my dog died,” you’ve cracked open the shield. From there, it’s a short step to realizing every life, even an enemy’s, deserves dignity.
Tell short, vivid vignettes. Lincoln’s brief letter to a mother who lost sons in war is remembered to this day because it’s raw, human, and direct. A few sentences, well spoken or written, can do more than a thousand arguments.
Public witness. Talk openly about death when it comes close — the funeral you attended, the friend lost in combat, the animal culled on the farm. For many, this is a world they’ve never entered. Seeing that you live in it matters.
Reclaim art. Share songs, poems, paintings, or films that treat death seriously. Art slips past defenses because it doesn’t lecture. It simply makes people feel.
Model dignity, even to an enemy. Be there when tragedy strikes someone you disagree with. Hold his hand. Let her cry on your shoulder. Nothing cuts deeper through ideology than grace shown to an opponent at their most vulnerable moment. Jesus said, "Love one another." That's because the beloved tends to return love. Hatred, cruelty, and gracelessness return more of the same.
Stories don’t need to be long or perfect. They just need to be told — and sometimes lived. Each one is a reminder that death is not abstract, not symbolic, not a meme.
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Remembering What Death Means
The reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death told us something chilling. For too many on the left, it wasn’t the loss of a man with a wife, family, and friends. It wasn’t the extinguishing of a life. It was just the fall of a symbol, a chance to mock, a meme to pass around. That kind of callousness doesn’t stay confined to politics. Once you’ve trained yourself to laugh at an enemy’s death, it gets easier to laugh at anyone’s.
Conservatives, for all our faults, still know better. We’ve seen death up close. We know it humbles. We know it wounds. And we know it deserves respect, even when it comes for someone we don’t like.
That’s why it’s on us to tell the stories. To show what death really means, not as an abstraction, but as a reality. Because if a culture forgets the dignity of death, it soon forgets the dignity of life.
Stories can remind us. Stories can re-teach us. Stories can make even the insulated feel what they’ve forgotten to feel. And if we want to pull our civilization back from the edge of barbarism, we’d better start telling them.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its inherent cruelty.
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