BALANCED VIEWS

Imam likely aware low road doesn’t lead to higher place Let Americans not flinch from fast-unfolding future

Leonard Pitts Jr.

The other day, a Muslim saved a terrorist.

It happened just after midnight Monday in London. The terrorist, according to authorities, was Darren Osborne, 47, from Cardiff, Wales, who drove 150 miles to the British capital, where he jumped a sidewalk and plowed into a crowd of worshipers outside a mosque as people were attending to a man who had collapsed.

Osborne is reported to have screamed, “I want to kill all Muslims!” The outraged crowd dragged him from the van, punching and kicking him. They might have killed him, but then Imam Mohammed Mahmoud of the Muslim Welfare House put himself between the mob and the man. “No one touch him!” he ordered. “No one!”

Mahmoud later told reporters it wasn’t just him, but “a group of brothers” who were “calm and collected and managed to calm people down.”

At least 10 people were reported injured in the attack. The man who collapsed later died, though the cause is unclear.

Mahmoud’s moral heroism seems especially stark in light of what Osborne allegedly did. Not just the random maiming of innocent people, but the fact that he did it, one presumes, in protest of terrorism.

That’s more than simply mad. It is also visceral proof of the human tendency to become what we abhor. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it like this: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

That would seem to be what happened to Osborne. It seems to be happening to many of us, the dangerous absurdities and frightening expediencies of this political moment having a coarsening effect on supporters of otherwise honorable causes.

So that a man who opposes the devastating agenda of the Republican Party devastates a GOP baseball practice with rifle fire. And people angry about police randomly killing African Americans randomly kill police officers. Now Darren Osborne apparently decides to protest terrorism by committing it.

We become what we abhor. We become the monster we fight. Small wonder. Few things are more attractive than violence cloaked in righteousness. This is especially true in a morally disjointed era wherein politics is broken and down is up and up is sideways and violence, like the snake in the Garden, whispers temptations and seductions. People who never would have listened before find themselves listening now.

That’s why Mahmoud’s example is powerful. His ability to separate himself from the anger of those people is a reminder that no one is predestined to be swept away by righteous anger into unrighteous acts. Being moral is a choice, albeit sometimes, a very difficult one.

Some will surmise that Mahmoud was able to make that choice because he’s a faith leader. But that’s a convenient rationalization that removes from us the onus of doing the right thing even when the wrong thing is alluring and nobody would blame you for it.

It is probably closer to the mark to believe he did it simply because he is an upright man who realizes you can’t take the low road to the high place. And that Nietzsche was right: gaze into the abyss, and the abyss gazes into you. You cannot control that.

But you can control what it sees when it does.

George F. Will

In 1859, when Manhattan still had many farms, near the Battery on the island’s southern tip The Great American Tea Co. was launched. It grew, and outgrew its name, becoming in 1870 The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., which in 1912 begat the first A&P Economy Store, a semimodern grocery store.

By 1920, there were

4,500 such stores; by 1930, 15,000. In 1936, in Braddock, Pennsylvania, A&P opened a “supermarket.” By the 1950s, A&P was the nation’s largest retailer, with a 75 percent share of America’s grocery business. A&P was, however, about to learn Karl Marx was right.

In “The Communist Manifesto,” Marx testified to capitalism’s transformative power: “All that is solid melts into air.” Sixty-eight years after he wrote that, in 1916, in Memphis, just as Henry Ford’s Model T was making personal mobility a universal aspiration and making suburbs practical and alluring, the first Piggly Wiggly opened.

This was the beginning of self-service grocery chains. Hitherto, shoppers handed lists to clerks, who plucked goods from shelves.

As new suburbs spread, A&P’s stores were old and distant. A&P filed for bankruptcy in 2015. By Nov. 25, 2016, its last stores closed.

Kroger grocery chain’s recently lowered earnings forecast caused a 19 percent drop in share prices, which had already fallen 12 percent in 2017. This was before Amazon announced it will buy the Whole Foods chain — more than 460 stores in 42 states, Canada and Britain — for $13.7 billion.

Whole Foods, like Kroger, had been experiencing difficulties from competitors and expanding consumer options. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Consumers are buying more of their groceries outside of traditional supermarkets. Online merchants, discounters and meal-kit delivery services are all grabbing market share.”

Neil Irwin of The New York Times writes of Amazon: “The online retailer is on a collision course with Walmart to try to be the predominant seller of pretty much everything you buy. Each one is trying to become more like the other — Walmart by investing heavily in technology, Amazon by opening physical bookstores and now buying physical supermarkets.”

America now faces a decision unique in its history: Is it tired of the turmoil of creative destruction? If so, it must be ready to do without creativity. And ready to stop being what it has always been: restless.

Americans are being plied with promises that the political class can, and is eager to, protect them from the need to make strenuous exertions to provide for themselves in an increasingly competitive world. If the nation really is ready to sag into a rocking chair, it can while away its days and ward off ennui by reading the poet Philip Larkin.

“It seems, just now,

To be happening so very fast.”

Those lines are from Larkin’s 1972 poem “Going, Going,” his melancholy, elegiac lament about the pace of what he considered despoiling change that was, he thought, erasing all that was familiar in his England. The first line of Larkin’s final stanza is: “Most things are never meant.”

This is a profound truth: The interacting processes that propel the world produce outcomes that no one intends. The fatal conceit is the belief that anyone is clever and farsighted enough to forecast the outcomes of complex systems. Who really wants to live in a society where outcomes are planned and unsurprising?

America is too young to flinch from the frictions — and the more than compensating blessings — of a fast-unfolding future.