Tad Talk
I’m excited to interact with you via this newsletter and share what goes on behind the scenes of my reporting. Yesterday I arrived in Tonga about nine hours before President Russell M. Nelson, of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who is in the thick of his tour of the South Pacific.
A woman from Australia heard he was coming and decided to sit in the hotel lobby and quietly watch him arrive. She quizzed me about him. When I told her he was 94 and this is the 21st country he’s visited in the past 12 months, her jaw dropped.
I was reminded of a private meeting President Nelson had in February with Arizona’s governor, the Catholic bishop of Phoenix and others. Arizona State University president remarked on President Nelson’s ambitious travel schedule and asked how he does it. President Nelson said, “I think Brigham Young and his companions would give us very little compassion when we complain about jet lag.”
In the South Pacific this past week, an unexpected and powerful theme emerged about protecting the innocent and the vulnerable while I listened to three very different yet similar people.
The first person, Adbul Aziz, is now world famous for grabbing a small credit card reader for a defensive weapon and running to put himself between a man armed with assault weapons and more than 80 people inside his mosque. I told him many people wonder how they would react in a similar situation.
“If you sit back and do nothing, you have more chance of being killed,” he said. That is true, I told him, but most people cannot run into the breach. Then Abdul said something that resonated with two comments I’d heard in two other cities in Oceania: “If anyone bullies anybody, I will stand up. I hate bullying. I won’t stand it.”
One day earlier, I spoke to Ingrid Woolf in Wellington, New Zealand, for a story I haven’t written yet. Her parents spirited their family from Austria to England to escape Hitler. They refused to speak German in front of her so she would forget it and could pass as British in case the Nazis conquered and occupied England.
Now, in her ninth decade, she has spearheaded a new and deeply emotional memorial designed to educate children about what can happen when leaders try to divide people. I asked why she does it. “It’s my duty,” she said. “My parents always protected me.”
As she said it, I wrote President Nelson’s initials next to her quote in my reporter’s notebook. Three days earlier, speaking to 7,000 people on a rugby field in Apia, Samoa, he had warned parents that they are raising children in a day when people call evil good and good evil. Then he asked them to act.
“Please protect your families from the deception you will see in the future,” he pleaded. “Protect your children. Help them to know the Lord and love him and keep his commandments and be free from the shackles of addiction and bondage.”
A Muslim, a Jew and a Latter-day Saint — each in a different place — shared a common value. It reminds me of another comment Abdul made. While the attacker killed 51 people, he failed to drive a wedge between people. Instead, the people of New Zealand and many religions in Christchurch were brought closer together.
“Before we were a finger,” he said, referring to Muslim isolation. “Now we are a fist,” an indelible part of the solidarity that has emerged in the larger interfaith community in Christchurch and among New Zealanders as a whole. “Before everyone was pointing at us (Muslims) and blaming us, especially the media. Now everyone is standing with us.” |
|
