Creativity Quote by Holly Near

Holly Near’s line lands like a protest song chorus: simple enough to chant, sharp enough to sting. It’s a trapdoor question that exposes the state’s favorite moral magic trick - claiming righteousness while performing the very violence it condemns. By repeating “killing people” three times, Near refuses the comforting vocabulary that usually sanitizes official violence (“justice,” “security,” “closure”). The repetition drags the listener back to the raw act, insisting that the body count doesn’t become ethical just because a courtroom or flag is nearby.

The intent isn’t abstract pacifism; it’s confrontation. Near forces an audience to sit with the contradiction at the heart of capital punishment and retaliatory war: the idea that killing can teach the sacredness of life. The subtext is about moral pedagogy - what a society models when it responds to harm with sanctioned harm. If the state’s lesson is “violence is wrong,” its method looks suspiciously like a curriculum in violence, dressed up as civic responsibility.

Context matters: Near comes out of late-20th-century American activism, where musicians weren’t just entertainers but organizers with guitars, pushing against Vietnam-era logic, the death penalty, and the broader machinery that turns vengeance into policy. Her question doesn’t offer a neat solution; it aims to make the listener feel the hypocrisy in their throat. That’s why it works: it turns the audience into participants, silently forced to answer - and to notice how hard it is to justify a “moral” killing without changing the subject.