An Awakening, Again: To Be Aware in a Time of Spectacle

An Awakening, Again: To Be Aware in a Time of Spectacle

Years ago, I wrote about awakening in the shadow of Covid — about masks, isolation, and the gaping hole left by lives lost and hearts broken. Today, rereading those words, I feel their weight differently. Awareness is no longer only about grief and survival. It is about seeing through the noise that surrounds us.

We live in a climate where influence can be both seductive and poisonous. Can it inspire? Yes. Can it divide and destroy? Also yes. What I see now is not only a pandemic of illness, but a pandemic of spectacle — where grief itself is repackaged as performance, where division is amplified until it feels like the only language we know how to speak.

In the most recent headlines — the assassination of Charlie Kirk — I am struck not only by the tragedy of a life lost, but by the speed with which his death was turned into martyrdom. Faith leaders, political voices, ordinary believers: many cloaked his misfortune in righteousness, as if grief alone were not enough, as if love itself could not stand on its own.

Let us agree and disagree — we are not the same in belief, politics, or ideology. But I find myself bewildered: is this now our moral currency? To turn loss into leverage, to weaponize tragedy instead of simply mourning it?

There are moments when life itself shakes you awake. Sometimes through crisis, sometimes through the quiet insistence of conscience. To be alive is to be aware. And right now, awareness means resisting the temptation to let spectacle drown out our humanity.

This is my awakening again: to pause, to question, to grieve honestly. To ask what it means to be human when performance threatens to eclipse truth. And to wonder aloud: what do we choose to honor — the noise, or the deeper call to love?