On Sunday morning I learned about the horrific massacre targeting Jews celebrating Hanukkah on a beach in Australia in a strange way, watching one of the most inspiring videos I’ve ever seen.
I started my day by doing exactly what I’ve told myself not to do: look at Twitter. The first thing I saw was a video — perhaps you’ve seen it — of a man standing behind a tree, firing a gun, as part of an attack on a gathering of Australian Jews on Bondi Beach.
As he methodically takes his shots, a man who looks unarmed runs up behind him, grabs the gun from the shooter and then points it at him. The shooter backs slowly away. The hero, a Syrian-born Australian named Ahmed el Ahmed, lays the gun against a tree. The video stops before el Ahmed is shot, apparently by a second shooter. Thankfully, he survived.
On Tuesday, I saw two more videos. The first showed an Australian couple — Boris Gurman, 69, and Sofia Gurman, 61 — confronting one of the two men accused of the shooting, with Boris Gurman appearing to wrestle the man’s gun away. The video ends before both the Gurmans are killed, possibly after the man grabbed a different gun.
I also watched and listened as a pregnant woman named Jessica Rozen shielded a little girl who was not her child. Amid screams, sirens and gunshots, the woman said, with a remarkably calm tone, “I got you. I got you. I got you,” over and over again. “We’re going to stay here, and we’re going to be nice and safe,” she said, “and no one’s going to hurt us, OK?”
They build brave people Down Under.
Words cannot express the anger, grief and horror I feel at the pure evil unleashed on the innocent people of Bondi Beach. My colleague Bret Stephens was right to highlight the failure of the Australian government before the attacks to protect its small Jewish population from a rising wave of antisemitic attacks. One of the suspects was known to authorities, and it’s critical to understand why such a man was able to gain access to an arsenal of weapons.
But the presence of evil doesn’t break people. From a young age, we learn that there are wolves in our midst. It is the absence of courage that plunges us into crisis. Great courage can help redeem a catastrophe. But abject cowardice not only magnifies our pain; it makes us doubt the strength and virtue of our nation and culture.
Think of the contrast, for example, between the days and hours after the slaughter at Bondi Beach and the unfolding horror we felt after the Uvalde massacre in Texas. If it weren’t bad enough that 19 children and two teachers died at the hands of a deranged young man, the police response was so slow and so cautious that the shooter wasn’t confronted and killed until more than an hour after his attack began.
And consider what happened on Feb. 14, 2018, when a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. A sheriff’s deputy, Scot Peterson, was on the scene, and when the shooting started, he jumped in a golf cart, drove straight to the school building and then … did nothing.
He stayed outside. Let me repeat that: An armed police officer stood outside while the kids he was supposed to protect ran, hid and fought on their own inside.
There was breathtaking courage on view in both shootings. Students and staff members alike laid down their lives to protect other innocents. But it was the two instances of cowardice that created waves of national revulsion. They felt like second blows — the horror of the school shootings was magnified by the woefully inadequate responses.
What do I mean by this? The shooters are “them” — people we cannot begin to understand, whether they’re terrorists or simply evil or deranged — but their targets are “us.” The people who respond are also part of us, and the police officers are supposed to be among the bravest. We thank them for their service and buy them meals because the very act of putting on a uniform is supposed to be a declaration to the public: I am willing to face death to serve you and protect you.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression. There have been many terrible events when the police responded with magnificent courage. I’m reminded of the Covenant school shooting in Nashville, for example. Students and staff members were under fire, and the police acted without hesitation. The instant they arrived, they followed the sound of gunfire until they confronted and killed the shooter at the scene.
The English writer and theologian C.S. Lewis wrote the best definition of courage I’ve ever read. I quote it frequently. He described courage as “not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.”
In other words, we don’t know if we’re brave until we first face genuine physical risk. We don’t know if we’re honest until telling the truth carries a consequence. We don’t know if we’re kind until our kindness is tested by cruelty.
Honest people look at el Ahmed’s act of heroism and wonder what they would have done.
It’s also why cowardice is so harmful. It annihilates virtue. One of the most dispiriting aspects of our modern political moment is that it feels as though cowards are everywhere. Institutions yield to bullies. Politicians yield to mobs. People are unwilling to tell even obvious truths if telling the truth will put a target on their back.
To take one example: I remember Tim Alberta’s 2021 profile of Representative Peter Meijer — one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump after Jan. 6, 2021. Alberta wanted to know, given the absolute absurdity of Trump’s claims that the election was stolen — and the violence that his lies inspired — why did so few stand up?
“At one point, Meijer described to me the psychological forces at work in his party,” Alberta wrote, “the reasons so many Republicans have refused to confront the tragedy of Jan. 6 and the nature of the ongoing threat.” He added:
Some people are motivated by raw power, he said. Others have acted out of partisan spite, or ignorance, or warped perceptions of truth and lies. But the chief explanation, he said, is fear. People are afraid for their safety. They are afraid for their careers. Above all, they are afraid of fighting a losing battle in an empty foxhole.
I don’t know anything about el Ahmed’s past, nor do I know anything about the Gurmans’ lives before Dec. 14, but all the truly courageous people I’ve known are those who spent their lives valuing character over accomplishment.
An emphasis on accomplishment can actually breed cowardice. Courage can cost you your career. Courage can cost you your life. And so the careerist learns to adapt, to hide when the bullets (real or figurative) start to fly. Sure, the hero can rise to the top, but he or she can also end up dead, and you can’t be a president or a chief executive or a member of Congress from the grave.
Conversations about courage aren’t just academic in our family. Several years ago, my wife, Nancy, made a vow. She will never turn her back on a suffering person. She won’t be the person who walks away. For several years, that meant things like comforting a crying stranger in an airport and befriending a person who was alone in a waiting room facing a cancer diagnosis.
But on the evening of Sept. 22, it meant something else. I was out of town, and Nancy met my son for dinner in downtown Chicago. After dinner, she decided to walk home, alone, to our new apartment. Behind her, a group of what looked like teenagers and young adults who were angry and shouting at one another was forming.
A young woman broke away and ran into the street, where a man knocked her down and began stomping her head into the pavement.
In that instant, Nancy decided to act. She charged straight at the man. She can’t remember her words, exactly, but they were something almost schoolmarmish, something like, “You can’t do this!” and “Stop hurting her!”
She can’t remember if she made contact with the man, but she knows he ran away — perhaps shocked that a middle-aged woman was confronting him so loudly and aggressively. Nancy stayed with the young woman, holding her in her arms while Nancy called the police and waited for an ambulance. It turned out that the woman was pregnant.
After the police came and the ambulance took the woman away, Nancy couldn’t stop shaking. Covered in the woman’s blood, Nancy slumped to the sidewalk, where she stayed until my son could rush to her side. When she thinks of that moment now, tears come to her eyes. She acted, but the entire episode was terrifying — from start to finish and for hours and days afterward.
I share that story in part because I’m proud of Nancy (and I’m mindful that even a situation that dangerous can’t compare with confronting someone firing a gun) but also because stories like that teach all of us that we never know what we will face, that some of the greatest tests of our lives can arise, suddenly, in moments when we least expect them to.
The people of Australia — just like the people of America — need to reckon with the systems, policies and ideologies that render us vulnerable to violence. But we will never eradicate the darkness that dwells in human hearts.
Still, we have our own choices to make. There must be light to answer the darkness, or the darkness will devour us all. In the days after Sept. 11, I remember the strength we all drew from Todd Beamer’s declaration to the passengers on Flight 93: “Let’s roll.”
The hijackers were the “them” there. But Beamer and the other passengers? They were us; they showed us exactly who we aspire to be.
And so it was at Bondi Beach. In the face of great evil, great good arose. Ahmed el Ahmed, Boris and Sofia Gurman and Jessica Rozen — remember their names. Remember their deeds. Through their courage, they remind us of the great and hopeful truth of one of my favorite passages in Scripture. From the prophet Isaiah:
“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: They that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about a topic that I’ve been thinking about for a long time: why so many young people are pessimistic about America and convinced that we’ve lost a glorious past:
One disadvantage of your teenage and early adult years is that you tend to experience adversity without perspective. It’s hard to place your own experience in a larger context when you haven’t yet experienced that context.
And that’s exactly where we — the older generations — have failed. When I see young people radicalizing on the left and right, including through their greater tolerance for political violence, I see the fruit of our own intolerance and polarization.
Consider this: In 2014, one year before Trump began his first presidential campaign, a Pew Research Center poll found that 82 percent of Republicans viewed the Democratic Party unfavorably or very unfavorably. The same poll found that 79 percent of Democrats had unfavorable or very unfavorable views of the Republican Party. Ominously, the percentage of Republicans and Democrats who viewed the opposing party very unfavorably had more than doubled in the previous 20 years.
Animosity breeds hyperbole, and vice versa. I know that politics ain’t beanbag, but we’ve all seen a steady escalation in political language. Every election is the most important of our lifetime. The fate of the nation hinges on every trip to the ballot box.
The Saturday round table with my colleagues Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle was about the growing gender divide on the American right. Are Republican women beginning to tire of Trump’s G.O.P.?
Also, there’s just this natural tendency to like the groups that seem to like you and dislike the groups that seem to dislike you. So you’re going to rationalize why everyone who likes you is right, and you’re going to rationalize why everyone who dislikes you is wrong. And when it gets into gender dynamics, that dynamic can get really ugly. We have seen circumstances where people on the left have really denigrated young men, and then you see people on the right really trying to jam women into this tradwife box.
Here’s the way I thought about it, and Jamelle, I’d love your thoughts on this. So, as long as you are the loyal character in the play that has been designed for you, like the mama bear role in the school boards, for example, you’re going to be loved, you’re going to be welcome, you’re going to be revered. But if you demonstrate any independence at all, especially if that independence is related to your sex or your race, then you’re going to be drummed out because of the specific experiences you’ve had. Then you become the problem.
You’re woke, you’re horrible, you’re terrible, whatever, and you’re out.
Last Thursday my colleague Emily Bazelon and I chatted about the Supreme Court and executive power. Here’s why we shouldn’t necessarily fear limits on the power of the administrative state:
This new structure just isn’t working. Congress is basically inert to the point of irrelevance, public confidence in government is collapsing, and there is a real sense that ordinary citizens have very little say in the decisions that have influence over their lives.
How do we change that? Well, we’ve got to return to the founders’ vision for the balance of power. It’s just wrong to say that we’re supposed to have coequal branches of government. Yes, each branch can check the others, but the legislature is in Article I for a reason — it’s the branch of government closest to the people. The House of Representatives is the most purely democratic part of the American government.
That’s why I think the most important aspect of the Slaughter oral argument came from Justice Neil Gorsuch, when he said, “Is the answer perhaps to reinvigorate the intelligible principle doctrine and recognize that Congress cannot delegate its legislative authority?”
Not to get too deep into the weeds, but that’s Gorsuch telling the solicitor general, D. John Sauer, that he wants to really pare back all these legislative delegations of authority to the executive. At the same time, the idea that the legislature could delegate lawmaking to the president but somehow make it OK by creating these multimember commissions has proved to be part of the problem.
Jam the president back into his box, which does grant him authority over the executive branch, but then tell Congress that if there is going to be enduring legal change, it has to come through them. I want the president’s agenda to be much less important (we’re not supposed to be electing kings, after all), and I want each of the elected branches of government more accountable to the people.
I just don’t see how hybrid, independent agencies fit into that equation. Technocracy isn’t democracy, and we’re supposed to be a democracy.
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