After Bondi, intense grief and fear shaped public response. But emotional proximity can distort moral judgement, narrowing debate and crowding out the analysis needed to prevent future violence.

The killings at Bondi were shocking, intimate and profoundly unsettling. Fifteen people were murdered in a place many Australians recognise as familiar and safe. The grief that followed was real and human, intensified by proximity and by the knowledge that this violence occurred not in a distant conflict zone but in the midst of ordinary life. There is nothing irrational or shameful in that response. It is how human beings are wired to react when threat enters their own world.

What must be resisted, however, is the temptation to allow grief to harden into certainty, and emotion to substitute for judgement. Moments of collective shock are precisely when our capacity for rational moral reasoning is at its weakest, not because we lack intelligence or goodwill, but because stress narrows perception. Under threat, the mind seeks clarity, blame and reassurance. Complexity becomes intolerable. Context is rejected as excuse. Explanation is confused with justification.

Yet it is precisely in these moments that restraint and analysis matter most.

To examine the conditions from which violence emerges is not to excuse it. Terrorism is always morally indefensible, particularly when it targets civilians. That truth does not weaken when placed alongside an honest examination of causation. On the contrary, refusing to ask why violence occurs guarantees only that it will recur. Moral condemnation without understanding may satisfy emotional urgency, but it offers no path toward prevention or peace.

There is a further discomfort that must be acknowledged. Our response to death is not evenly distributed. The loss of lives close to home can evoke deeper anguish than the deaths of........

© Pearls and Irritations