Reclaiming Our Agency

For more than a week, airwaves and newsfeeds have been flooded with commentary trying to make sense of the horrific assassination of conservative movement leader Charlie Kirk. Most everyone acknowledges that Kirk’s murder has brought our country to an inflection point, but there’s not much agreement on how we got here and how we go forward. 

Thankfully, Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, has stepped up to the plate to provide thoughtful context and leadership, as well as a message of unity that is sorely lacking elsewhere.   

“Social media is a cancer in our society right now,” the Republican governor said shortly after the shooting in his home state. “I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, go hug a family member, go out and do good in the community.” 

Cox’s comments have gotten a lot of attention the past week, largely because they’re so incongruous with how the rest of us think and talk these days, especially in times of tragedy. He’s also saying something that most people simply don’t want to hear. 

“I can’t emphasize enough the damage that social media and the internet is doing to all of us,” he said in a television interview last Sunday. “These trillion-dollar companies, the most powerful companies in the history of the world, have figured out how to hack our brains and get us addicted to outrage, which is the same type of dopamine, the same chemical, that you get from taking fentanyl. Entrepreneurs are taking advantage of us, and we are losing our agency.” 

How is it possible that free people in a free society have let their “agency,” their ability to think and act for themselves, get hijacked by a bunch of greedy coders in Silicon Valley? 

I get how we love our memes and keeping track of our friends and family through our social media feeds. But at what cost? 

To his credit, Cox said in the same interview that no one should be looking to any other individual for how to think and live their lives, including who’s sitting in the Oval Office. 

“I don’t know why we feel like, as Americans, we have to get up in the morning and decide how we’re going to react or act based on what the president says or what a governor says or what anyone else says,” he told the interviewer. “In my conservative philosophy, and quite frankly, in my faith philosophy, we believe in agency. The United States of America is a collection of a lot of different people. No president is going to lead us out of this. It’s going to be every single one of us.” 

I was in Virginia last weekend for my mom’s memorial service, celebrating 94 years of a life well-lived. My mom (Margaret Catherine Bannan Shaw) was Irish, so it was two solid days oflaughing, drinking, and sharing stories about her life, culminating in her being laid to rest next to my dad, a U.S. Army veteran, at the Albert J. Horton Memorial Veterans Cemetery in Suffolk, Virginia. At her service, kids, grandkids, and great grandkidsread poetry and scripture in her honor. We prayed together and we sang together. The bagpiper played “Danny Boy,” a favorite of my parents. It was pretty much a perfect send-off. 

Our family that was present ranged in age from about ten to over 70, and I can count on one hand the times I saw anyone look at their phone all weekend. Unlike Charlie Kirk’s murder, no one recorded the service, but it’s sealed forever as a beautiful moment in our brains. 

My mom gave us all our agency back. I hope we can keep it.