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Baron Coleman's Opening Statement About TIME Reveals Ben Sasse to Charlie Kirk Similarities
YouTube video by Baron Coleman Clips (@BaronColemanClips) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1ePbqjIYIo). OPINION COMMENTARY by Baron Coleman (Baron Coleman Clips (@BaronColemanClips)) — one commentator's contested analysis of the Charlie Kirk assassination and the State v. Tyler Robinson prosecution. These are his own assertions and theories, NOT the court record, NOT established fact, and NOT endorsed by profoundd; some make unverified allegations about named individuals. Archived here, attributed and lane-separated as commentary, so the claims can be weighed against the primary record — the tyler-robinson-trial hearings and filings in this same collection. Inclusion in this archive is not evidence of truth.
That's time they assumed they would have in the future. I'm sure Charlie had put off a lot of things trying to will all make a big nest egg and then I'll devote all my time to my family as my kids get >> [music] >> I want to dig into the opening today and I will warn you it's going to be hard for me to get through. I saw a story that popped up I saw a story that popped up an interview that's going to be played this weekend and it really pulled on my heartstrings. It's a it's a guy that I did not consider a not a political enemy but not a political ally. A guy I agreed with sometimes, a guy I didn't agree with most of the time it seems like. Um and he was diagnosed with a terrible condition. And they're going to do an interview this weekend and I started thinking about it and I after I saw the the clip of the interview, I had to run a couple errands today. I left the house and I'm driving around no sound, no music, no podcasting, just 10 and 2 driving through neighborhoods and I just did some thinking. Did some hard thinking in the and and pieces of the opening started coming to me. I didn't know it was pieces of the opening. But by the time I got back home, I thought there's my opening. That's what I'm going to write today and I had to sit down and write it. It took a while. Um and I will tell you I had to stop a few times and walk around. So, if you are the sentimental type buckle up. If you're not, check back in in about 10 minutes. >> [laughter] >> Because this is your opening statement. And this past December United States Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska revealed he'd been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Stage four pancreatic cancer diagnosis is devastating. It's nearly certainly a death sentence. And not a long one either. Your end after diagnosis typically comes within weeks or months at most after being sentenced to death essentially. Uh he said at the time, this was around Christmas last year. He said he had around 3 months. That's just under 13 weeks. He was just 53 years old. And he knew he didn't have much time. Time is the most intimate stranger you'll ever know. It lives inside of you. It lives inside every heartbeat. It lives inside every breath. And it lives inside every fleeting thought. But time isn't something you can hold or measure. It has no weight. It has no matter. And you certainly can't bargain with it on any terms but its own. We like to use phrases like having time or making time or killing time. And doing doing so, we act as if it's some kind of a possession we own or some sort of creature we can dominate. But in truth, time owns us. It It moves through us the way a river cuts through the landscape. Time carves its own path. It erodes and deposits all around us. And it never once consults with us. It doesn't ask our permission. And at any given moment, time might feel a little viscous. You have a single afternoon spent waiting for news. A sleepless night of worry. A A long drive even through flat farmland. It can make minutes feel like hours. And in those moments, your mind is desperate to speed time up. You're so trapped in the intensity of what's happening in the right now that every second feels excruciatingly amplified and elongated. Pain does this especially well. But so do things like anticipation and boredom. Think back to when you were in school. You stared at a classroom clock near the end of the day.This is an entirely different experience from now being an adult who glances up at the clock and measuring the exact same quantity of time, wondering where the morning went. In the moment, time can seem almost cruel. It has no hurry to it. It refuses to hurry. And yet those same hours compress with unbelievable speed once they've slipped into your memory. Looking backwards across a decade and the years sort of fold together. They compress into just a handful of scenes. You have birthdays and arguments and maybe a particularly nice quiet evening. You have first steps, last words. The long slow days of early parenthood when every night feels endless and every morning arrives too soon. You look back and they blur into a single memory. It's just a memory of exhaustion with mixed in with a little tenderness. That summer that dragged on when you were 16 years old? Well, summers are just a brief flash of time by the time you hit 40. It's one of time's quirks. Time slows when you want it to hurry and it speeds up the instant you leave it behind. We live in many ways in a stretched present but a compressed past. And this mismatch leaves us constantly surprised by how quickly everything moves. Once a moment's gone, it's gone and it's gone with finality. There's no technology, there's no memory, there's no regret that can get that time back. You can't step twice into the same river. And the truth of that grows heavier with age. The particular way a light hit on a particular field on a particular spring afternoon. The exact tone of your child's laughter at 3 years old. The specific weight of a hand in your hand during a hospital visit. Those things don't ever come back. They don't return. They're gone. You can take pictures, you can take videos, you can have some semblance of what it sort of looked like in the moment. But they replicate the moment. They don't recreate the moment. The sounds, the smells, what's happening just outside of the frame, it's all lost. You can't visit the past. It's a place that's been permanently closed. All we can do is carry forward incomplete memories drawn from imperfect recollection. Time doesn't pause while we argue, it doesn't pause while we sleep, it doesn't pause while we're distracted by your phone screen or ambition or grief. Time continues through the nights you wish would never end, and it forces you to face the days you wish would never begin. Time moves while we're unconscious in surgery, while you're lost in prayer or meditation, and even while entire nations are torn apart in war or even at peace. There are periods like long illnesses, deep depression, even the first month of new parenthood, when you lose track of calendars altogether. The sun still rises, the seasons still turn, the moon still waxes and wanes, because time isn't malicious. It doesn't mean you any harm. It actually doesn't care about you at all. Time came before you, and it will outlast you. It will continue long after you're gone. The clocks will keep ticking, but they'll be ticking in empty rooms. The children in your home will grow to adults who they themselves become parents and then eventually grandparents. Empires, kingdoms, nations will rise and fall. The molecules that make up your body that once answered to your name, they'll disperse. They'll become something entirely unrecognizable. Time won't notice the difference. It's not a morbid thought, it's a clarifying one.The continuity of time beyond our individual existence strips away any illusion that the world revolves around you, around your But time also quietly insists that whatever meaning you must find must be made inside this brief little window you're given. Because that window's going to close whether you're finished or not. We waste time with a kind of breathtaking callousness. We scroll through endless feeds on social media of and we we're looking at other people's curated moments. And our own moments are wasted. We postpone conversations that matter. We don't take trips we've always wanted to take. We withhold apologies we owe. We keep to ourselves declarations of love that maybe you're too proud or too frightened to make. We treat the future as some sort of inexhaustible reservoir that you can But we don't realize at the moment that every day spent in distraction is a day subtracted from the total. The wasted time is rarely dramatic. It's just a slow accumulation of small surrenders. Another hour scrolling on the phone, another evening of half attention. Another weekend to deferred until things calm down. Well, things rarely calm down. The calm you're waiting for is often just the quiet that arrives when the people we meant to spend time with are no longer around. Nowhere is the scarcity of time more sharply felt than in the years we have with our children. The window is so much narrower than we realize while you're inside of it. From birth till the day they leave for college or leave the house for their own independent life, usually around 18 years. That's fewer than 7,000 days. That's fewer than a thousand weekends. A pretty significant portion of that time is spent sleeping or in school or hanging out with friends. The hours of genuine, undivided presence actually is quite small by comparison. Toddlers who once clung to your legs, they become teenagers and they close their bedroom doors. The child who needed help tying his shoes one year is asking for the car keys in the blink of an eye. Parents often discover far too late that the phase they found exhausting was also the phase they would later give almost anything to revisit. Because the quantity of time is limited. The quality is what you can still choose. Even the very best of intentions collide with the ordinary and sometimes harsh demands of things like work or just fatigue or the simple fact that children grow on There's a particular ache that comes from realizing how little of that shared time remains. You look at a picture or video of a four-year-old and the adult standing next to you seems like a stranger who somehow replaced that little person you once snuggled to sleep. The days of building block towers or reading the same picture book for the hundredth time, of answering endless why questions, nobody announced the end of those days. They simply became yesterday. Then they became last year. Then finally they become a memory that surfaces at unexpected moments and leaves a hollow place in the deepest part of your soul. Sometimes nature is merciless, but it's also clarifying. It won't slow, no matter how badly you want it to. It won't go back, no matter how badly you regret it's gone. And it won't wait for us to become ready. It moves with or without your attention. Before you arrive and after you leave. The only power we possess is the power to decide inside that narrow span of time you're gifted, what will you notice? What will you protect?And what will you let slip away without a fight? The present moment is the only one that's ever truly yours. You can't get yesterday and you're not guaranteed tomorrow. For now, anyway, it's right here. You can fill it with distraction or you can fill it with attention. Time itself, it's not going to judge the choice. It'll It'll simply continue on, carrying whatever we made of it into the long forgetting that awaits for us all. Former Senator Ben Sasse sat down for an interview with CNN. Uh I'm pretty sure it's going to air this weekend, but they released a short clip of it today. I want to play a little bit of that clip, a little It's like a 30 seconds of that clip. >> I have serious regret about how much I traveled. I would just come back from all my trips and take all the hotel keys and throw them on the floor of our closet in my home office, and uh all of a sudden it became thousands and thousands of keys. You know, like that's a hell of a lot of missed dinners. And you look at it kind of like forlornly. I would look at my kids, and I felt like they had a chain around their neck with an hourglass, and I was watching the years, the months or the years or the dinners we had left as a family, and I'd look at my kids and I'd see the sand through the hourglass. Like, what the hell was I doing instead >> Whatever you think of Ben Sasse's politics, whether you agreed with him or disagreed he had hopes and dreams. He had a wife and kids. He had an un- believa- unbelievably busy career from a very young age. He traveled for most of his career. First, he commuted as a consultant, then he became a staffer in Washington, D.C. Then he was a part-time professor at Texas, where he traveled back and forth to teach. Then he went back to D.C. as a staffer, where he traveled back and forth to work. Then back to being a consultant, where he traveled for work. And then he was the president of a university, where he traveled to work. And all that was before traveling for his job as being elected to the United And his reflections on the true cost of time that he lost with his family hit me really hard. I've had the luxury of working from home for most of my career. Not everyone has that luxury. If you're a coal miner in Eastern Kentucky, there aren't a lot of work from home opportunities. Not a lot of coal mines exist in spare bedrooms. The same goes for most employment. But even working from home, I've lost a lot of time. It's easy to do. There's always one more thing that needs to be done. One more thing that needs to be looked up. One more thing that needs And time won't judge me for that. But it may punish me for it. And that is your opening statement. I hope you enjoyed it as I worry. I think of of the decision that TPUSA made to put Erica Kirk in charge of TPUSA. And I think of it in the context two little kids that lost their That's time they assumed they would have in the future. I'm sure Charlie had put off a lot of things trying to well, I'll make a big nest egg and then I'll devote all my time to my family as my kids get older and and he doesn't have that. But he left his wife a multi-millionaire dozens of times over. >> [snorts] She has the time. I don't know why she's not spending it with I don't know why she's not spending it with >> [music]