Thoughts: So close!

The air is heavy.

A year ago, a forceful and fearless thirty-one-year-old Charlie Kirk was gunned down.

A quarter of a century ago, fearless NYPD and FDNY men and women rushed towards dangers as thousands ran away from the melting twin towers.

And because of time zone difference, on the same day after these years, I learned of the Hong Kong trios were sentenced to imprisonment from five years to seven some years.

Just imagine the weight that’s heavier than gravity.

This could have been about politics or religion.

But it’s not.

It’s about lives living for something greater than life, no matter how fleeting that moment.

Lives were cut short abruptly, or stunted.

Charlie Kirk, just note this:

On September 21, over 200,000 descended on Glendale, Arizona to attend a funeral service for Charlie Kirk, in State Farm Stadium and its overflow.

Rough AI estimate puts the worldwide audience on TV networks and internet streaming to somewhere between 10-20 millions.

What was known for sure was that all major US networks broadcast live.

Comparable events could be the Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup Final, Olympic, or the Pope.

All that to say that regardless of where one stands in the religious and political spectrum, the Charlie Kirk incident was anything but a thunder in a quiet night.

It reverberated all over the world where religious freedom was practiced.

Except Hong Kong.

Perhaps HK seminaries no longer produce missionaries; or short of professors on missiology.

FDNY and NYPD ran towards certain death not just to save friends and relatives, but strangers.

Not only that, they gave their lives for the uniform they dedicated to wearing.

An idea, an ideal, a call.

Noble.

Multitudes of charitable and volunteer organisations sprang up to keep alive their memories and to bear fruits of their sacrifices.

At a quarter century, Manhattan again remains the focus.

The three Hong Kongers just sentenced?

A more intertwined background would reveal the call that matches their devotion, whether it’s agreeable to readers.

Lee and Ho are older, roughly budding college graduates in the 1970s.

HK University Engineering and Law respectively no less.

Chow is much younger but not less talented and full of future.

She got into Cambridge Physics with high HK high school honors.

She gave up Physics doctorate study to pursue Law in HKU, became a barrister.

All three of them could have reaped good profits from their professional careers.

Could have.

While Lee and Ho dedicated their lives, influenced by the love of the fate and struggle of the Chinese people in the years of 1970 and following, they never wavered in the improvement of the fate of fellow Chinese.

There was no change of their nationalism though ironically they were sentenced under National Security Law.

Lee was reportedly detained during the June 4 1989 Tianmen massacre, for taking material supports to the protesting students.

And Ho was the main sponsor of an organization supporting human right lawyers in Mainland China.

And Chow needs no further introduction for anyone having read her court statements.

The trios have been remanded for over thousand days before conviction, a strange administrative ploy of the common law in the hands of a totalitarian administration.

Sad as though their lives and fates might appear, or actually are, they are the envy of me.

I’m much older than Chow and couldn’t claim to know her kind of nationalism in her pursuit of a constitutionally robust China.

But regarding Lee and Ho, who are pretty much just a few years my senior, I can appreciate the China they might have dreamt and devoted to improve.

The China image they might have had was perhaps the same I derived from folklores and novels, but nonetheless drove us to at least a consideration of dedicating our lives to.

Lee and Ho remained steadfast in their ideal, foolish now demonstrated nonetheless.

But they maintained their pursuit, paid by their multiyear imprisonment.

I on the other hand was taught to take on a different ideal to replace China, the Kingdom of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But that fork has many more detours that could blur the ideal and muffle the call.

That’s why I so admire the trio.

Not to mention Charlie.

Not to mention the NYPD and FDNY patriots.

They persevered.

I wish I could have.

My spirit has been willing.

Regardless, I admire them for their steadfast pursuit of their ideal that’s greater than themselves.

History will honor them.