Ahmed Al Ahmed, the hero who tackled and disarmed one of the two gunmen who opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach on December 14, received a check last Friday for more than $1.65 million while recovering from his wounds in a Sydney hospital. More than 43,000 people from around the world contributed to a GoFundMe campaign that collected over $2.5 million in funny little Australian dollars.
Yes, this is one of those “light in the darkness” Nice Time stories for which we wish there hadn’t been any reason at all. Sixteen people were killed in the attack, and dozens wounded, including Al Ahmed, who was shot multiple times in his left arm. Australia has universal healthcare, but the donations will help him as he recovers from his injuries.
Here’s Canadian social media influencer person Zachery Dereniowski, whom we hadn’t heard of either but who apparently encourages people to be decent to each other, giving the oversized check, or cheque, to Al Ahmed last week.
Al Ahmed has also been visited in the hospital by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and by Chris Minns, premier of New South Wales state, which is always fun to abbreviate because “NSW” looks like it might be something naughty.
Even billionaire shithead hedge fund jerk Bill Ackman took a brief break from being a shithead and donated $99,000 US to the fund before returning to his usual pastimes of trying to destroy Harvard and praising Elon Musk as a visionary. Ackman is also on the “Let’s not worship Hitler while we wreck America with Project 2025” side of the current rightwing civil war, so consider this paragraph his cookie to encourage further good behavior.
People just really wanted to help the very ordinary 44-year-old guy in a T-shirt who hid behind parked cars before he charged one of the shooters from behind and took his gun away. Here’s the video, showing Al Ahmed grabbing the gun, pointing it at the shooter he disarmed until the killer ran off, then putting down the gun and waving to indicate he wasn’t a threat.
And Mr. Al Ahmad, a fruit shop owner who came from Syria over 20 years ago and dad of two, is a pretty good light in these dark times; when presented with the check, his first, almost flustered reaction was “I deserve it?”
When he was asked what he’d say to the donors who helped the fundraiser, Al Ahmad went with his own version of Kurt Vonnegut’s “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind,” saying he’d tell people “To stand with each other, all human beings. And forget everything bad, behind the back [as in ‘put it behind you’] and keep going to save life.”
He said that when he acted, he did it “from the heart. Because it was a nice day, everyone enjoying celebrating, with their kids, woman, man, teenager all, everyone was happy and they deserve, they deserve to enjoy.”
It was a lovely day and people deserved to just enjoy it. If there’s a better motive for heroism, we don’t know what is.
The generosity of the donations for Al Ahmed reflected people’s yearning to do something in the face of horror, to find ways to beat back the helplessness we feel when the world goes terribly wrong. As Americans did following the 9/11 attacks, Australians set new records for blood donations the day after the Bondi beach attack, standing in line for hours to give blood.
Logically they knew that the 42 wounded survivors — down to just 26 still hospitalized by evening of the Monday after the attack — didn’t “need” blood from more than 20,000 donors. But again and again, the people in this BBC video say “it’s something I can do,” and that’s plenty.
As one Sydney man in the video — with that precious O Negative blood that can be used most widely — says, “The city needs blood donations all the time, so I’m going to be a better citizen from now on and give blood more often.” Good onya, mate.
Other snapshots, this time from America, following the mass shooting at Brown University, the same day we were getting the news of the Bondi Beach shootings:
Michelle Cheng owns a café near the Brown campus, and her shop was full of customers when police called for a lockdown. When it was over, she made sure that none of her customers had to go home by themselves, and when five or six students said they were afraid to return to campus housing Saturday night, or just couldn’t get home, Cheng and the building’s owner, David Baskin, put them up in a nearby apartment building he owns.
Andrea Capotosto, a staffer at Brown’s School of Public Health, saw a notice that the university would be providing breakfast at a dining hall Sunday morning, so she stationed herself at a table outside with a big stuffed teddy bear and a handmade sign reading “FREE MOM HUGS.” She had no shortage of students who wanted a hug.
“My mom instincts told me what do,” Capotosto said. She added that she has two kids, an 18-year-old son and a 23-year-old daughter. She said knows that even though students are in college and adults, they are still young. “I just think of my daughter,” she said.
These are the ways we patch together an always-breaking world. We give blood. We sing to the healthcare workers from our windows. We give money. We make food. We sign the petition. We go to the protest against a would-be dictator who’s taking people away from their families and homes.
We connect in whatever ways we can, even clumsily. I think of that heartbreakingly funny story from The Onion after 9/11: Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake.
Mr. Rogers’s advice to “Look for the helpers” was meant to help parents comfort kids dealing with news from our terrifying world. But for us adults, there’s an implied second part: if you can, be a helper yourself.
Happy Boxing Day, whatever that is, and this is your all-day OPEN THREAD.
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[Reuters / The National / Guardian / WaPo (gift link)]
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