The Last Word Is Always the Hardest

More than once, I’ve been told that I should just “let people be wrong.” That’s good advice—wise even—but I confess I don’t always have the discipline to sit quietly when foolishness puts on a crown and calls itself wisdom.

After the murder of Charlie Kirk, people everywhere were grieving, angry, and trying to make sense of what felt senseless, including me. Then along came one man who decided the whole tragedy was about slavery and reparations.

Now, I’m not afraid of hard conversations. I’ve been in talk radio, and I’ve been married long enough to know that disagreements don’t end the world. So, I tried to reason with the man.

A baggage handler at Reno-Tahoe International, his name is Tiger, and he came roaring in as his name suggested.

“People just have not learned a lesson,” he typed. “Karma don’t give a damn about who you are or what you look like. Should have been preaching peace and fellowship instead of barking racist ideology and bullshit.”

Well, that’s one way to enter a room. I quoted Charles Spurgeon about bold-hearted men mistaken for mean-spirited ones, hoping to steer him toward reflection. But instead of reflection, I got deflection.

He called me a racist and said my heart was nasty. Now, if you’ve ever been on Facebook, you know the temptation in that moment: to wind up, cock your rhetorical fist, and let it fly.

But I paused, and I tried gentleness. “You don’t know me,” I said. “And yet you condemn me. Shame on you.”

He came back wanting to talk. Promising sign, right?

We even circled back to accountability, agreeing at least that all of us could stand to do a little more of it. But then Tiger veered back into the ditch, insisting the entire country must confess and repent, while I pointed out that individuals are the ones who make choices and bear responsibility.

It was like we were building a house with two hammers and no nails. Sparks, yes. Structure, no.

Finally, I said, “Okay. We are at a stalemate. I’ve never owned a slave and you’ve never been a slave. Therefore, we owe nothing to each other.”

That’s when he pulled the trump card—my skin. He told me my race couldn’t possibly understand, and he warned me that my family might have been guilty back in the day.

Now, here’s the funny part. My family came to this country as slaves. Indentured. A different skin tone and history book, but the same chain.

I don’t wear it today, and I don’t want anyone else to pay me for it. I broke it by living free.

So I told him plainly: “My family came here as slaves. I ask nothing of anyone. You just want money.”

Silence. Hours passed. No response. Conversation over.

And that, my friends, is why I no longer waste much energy trying to teach common sense on the internet. Not because common sense has disappeared, but because people confuse critical thinking with clever ways of defending their own prejudices.

Tiger doesn’t want the truth; he wants victory.

But truth doesn’t need victory. Truth doesn’t need applause or compensation.

It stands, steady and unbending, like a fencepost in a high desert wind. Lies are the things that require invention, dressing up, and constant patchwork.

In the end, I let Tiger have the final word, or rather, the last silence, because the last word is always the hardest—and sometimes the best last word is no word at all. Either way, I’ll keep speaking truth where I can, and leaving the mud to those who prefer rolling in it.

I should have known Tiger wasn’t done. The silence I mistook for surrender turned out to be him catching his breath. Sure enough, he popped back up in the thread like a jack-in-the-box you forgot you wound too tightly.

“Lmao,” he wrote.

Two syllables. No punctuation. The universal way of saying, I win because I laughed.

Then came the kicker: “I served this country and work for my money… This country owe people that built this land that had money, land and life seized.”

Now, I’ll pause here for a moment. Let’s give Tiger his due.

Serving your country is honorable. Working for your money is respectable.

And feeling people got wronged—that’s human. But dragging all of that into the murder of Charlie Kirk felt like trying to repair a leaky roof with a shoehorn.

Wrong tool. Wrong problem.

So I answered in kind.

“I served my country too—twice,” I told him. “My family came from Ireland as indentured servants, and remained as such until the 1890s. So please don’t obfuscate the message by saying Charlie Kirk’s murder is about the original sin of the U.S., because that was paid in full between 1861 and 1865. And if you are a Democrat, look to that history. It was that party that held the black man down. History.”

Now, I know some folks will want to fact-check me. And that’s fine—history loves an argument. But the larger point is suffering isn’t a monopoly.

My people bled, sweated, and served, too. And yet, I’m not sending a bill to my neighbor for something his great-granddaddy may or may not have done.

Tiger wasn’t ready for that kind of plain talk. He wanted to keep the focus on collective blame, while I insisted on individual responsibility.

And in that tension lies the heart of most arguments these days. Some people prefer to assign their anger to history and politics, rather than confronting it themselves in the present moment.

It would’ve been easier for me to quit right there, but I kept typing, because sometimes you plant seeds knowing you won’t be around to see them grow. Maybe Tiger will never agree with me.

Maybe he’ll never believe that truth stands on its own without applause or reparations. But maybe, a year from now, Tiger will remember the Irish servants, or the Civil War graves, or the simple fact that two veterans stood on opposite sides of a Facebook thread but still saluted the same flag.

That’s my hope, anyway.

In the end, he gave me a “Lmao” and a shrug. And maybe that’s all he had left without feeling like a sellout. Wait till Tiger learns that “Uncle Tom” was the hero of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and not the mistaken pejorative it’s become.

But here’s what I know–conversations like this remind me that truth doesn’t need to shout. It just needs to show up, patiently, steadily, and without apology.

People will laugh at it, dismiss it, twist it, and stomp on it. But truth is stubborn, as it will survive long after the comments section has gone quiet.

And if you ever doubt that, remember—history has the last word. Always has. Always will.