Price of Liberty

A single shot across the stage,

not from a battlefield, but a campus wall.

The crowd gasped … some in grief,

others in silence,

many in the weary knowledge

that words return to the mouths that spoke them.

He once said

“some deaths are worth the cost,”

as if liberty were an altar

where children could be laid.

He called empathy weakness,

a word unfit for strong men.

Now the echo of those sentences

hangs heavier than the rifle’s crack.

Across the nation, grief split like glass.

One side raised him as a martyr,

their loss a wound to tribe and creed.

The other turned away,

unable to summon tears

for a man who would not shed them.

History whispers its warnings.

A diplomat’s blood in Paris, 1938.

Windows broken in orchestrated rage,

the state pretending outrage was “spontaneous.”

A prince in Sarajevo, 1914,

his car riddled, his empire unraveling.

And now, America

where schoolchildren fall unnoticed

while a pundit’s death ignites the storm.

Free speech is not freedom from consequence.

Rhetoric shapes weather;

it teaches us whom to mourn,

and whom to forget.

When cruelty becomes creed,

do not be surprised

that compassion withers in reply.

Selective empathy is no empathy at all.

It is a ledger of worth,

lives tallied by allegiance,

grief rationed by tribe.

And in that accounting,

every life grows cheaper.

This was not justice.

Political murder corrodes the soul of nations.

But nor is it sainthood,

for martyrdom belongs to love,

not to contempt.

So let the mirror stand:

If we are to break this cycle,

it will not be with more glass shattered,

or more names weaponized,

but with the courage to say

every life is sacred,

and none is collateral.