Thankful for Those Who Run Towards Danger

Another walk downtown

I have no worthwhile reflections in the aftermath of the bank shooting in Louisville. I don’t even have good questions to ask. 

Yesterday, I walked to the scene of the crime. I know the building well. I have attended many meetings there. Slugger Field, home of the minor league baseball team Louisville Bats, sits across the street. My daughters and I attend many games there each summer.

In Book II of The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides describes the plague that descended on Athens:

“In the first days of summer the Lacedaemonians and their allies, with two-thirds of their forces as before, invaded Attica, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of Lacedaemon, and sat down and laid waste the country. Not many days after their arrival in Attica the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians. It was said that it had broken out in many places previously in the neighborhood of Lemnos and elsewhere; but a pestilence of such extent and mortality was nowhere remembered. Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often.”

When I read of men and women rushing toward danger, this passage always comes to mind. The doctors of Athens hurrying to save victims of the plague…heading toward danger….and suffering for their willingness to give of themselves. 

Thanks heavens there are people like Nickolas Wilt and CJ Galloway. May heaven bring peace to the families of the victims, to the people of Louisville, and to the hearts of all men, women and children on the earth. 

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Photos taken April 11, 2023. Image created by Midjourney.