Saturday night, a man with guns and knives rushed the security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He fired several shots. An officer took a round to his vest. The guy was tackled before he got to the ballroom. The President, the Vice President, the Cabinet, and a few hundred journalists. Everyone got home safe. The officer should be fine.
By recent standards? That’s a win.
But here’s my concern.. When they asked the President if this kind of violence is just part of politics now, he basically said yes. And then he said we need a new, more secure White House ballroom.
I get it. Threats are rising. So you build the wall taller. You buy the better vest. You move the dinner to a harder-to-reach place.
That logic makes sense. Part of it is right. But I think the rest of it is missing something big. Let me tell you two quick stories.
Johannesburg, 2008
My wife and I visited South Africa for work. They told us, very nicely, that we would not be driving ourselves anywhere. Company drivers only. The colleagues we visited while there lived in compounds behind ten-foot walls. The walls went six feet underground so nobody could tunnel under them. Electric fencing on top.
These were not crazy people. They were kind, generous hosts. Our company had simply looked at their society and done the math. The only sensible answer was a fortress.
But once you choose the fortress, your whole life bends around it. You stop walking places outside the walls. You stop knowing your neighbors outside them.. Your kids grow up learning that the world outside the gate is something to hide from, not join.
I’m not picking on South Africa here. I’m just saying: that trip showed me what a country looks like when it has decided violence is just the weather. The only question left is what kind of roof to put up.
The President’s answer last night? Build a better ballroom? That’s the ten-foot wall going six feet underground. It’s not wrong that we need security. We do. But if “build a stronger room” is the whole answer, we’ve already given up on the bigger question.
Norway, 2011
On July 22, 2011, a far-right terrorist set off a bomb in Oslo. Then he went to a small island where teenagers from the governing party were at summer camp. He shot 69 of them. The total death toll was 77. It was the worst attack on Norwegian soil since World War II.
Among the dead were friends of the Prime Minister. If any country ever earned the right to build walls after that, it was Norway.
Here’s what their Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, said the next morning:
“Our response is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity. But never naivety.”
He wasn’t being soft. He was being precise. He was saying: a free, trusting society is something we choose to keep being. The test of that choice is what we do on the worst day, not the best one.
There’s a story Norwegians tell about King Olav V. During the 1973 oil crisis, when driving was banned on weekends, the king put on his skis and took the public tram to the hills like everyone else. Someone asked why he travelled without bodyguards.
His answer: “I have four million bodyguards.”
He meant the whole population of Norway. He meant his safety was tied to his neighbours’ goodwill. The moment he stopped trusting that, he would stop being their king in any way that mattered.
What We’re Actually Choosing
I want to be clear here. I am not against security. The Secret Service should have whatever it needs. If a better ballroom keeps people alive, build it. I mean that.
But the ballroom is not a vision for the country. It’s a wall. And walls only make sense if you’ve given up on the space and people outside them.
What the Norwegians understood is that political violence is not like the weather. It grows from a culture. It grows from how we talk to each other. Whether we treat our opponents as neighbours or enemies. Whether public life feels like a shared project or a cage match.
We have spent years building a culture that is lonely, mean, and scared. We act like there’s only so much country to go around, and someone is about to steal yours. That is the soil. The shooters are what grow in it.
You cannot vest your way out of that. You cannot ballroom your way out of it. We need to talk about coming together, about the cost of dehumanizing others and of building walls between our compatriots,
You can harden enough targets that the violence becomes someone else’s problem. Someone with a thinner wall. Someone with no Secret Service detail. That’s the Johannesburg solution. It works, in a narrow way. But it’s the solution of a country that has stopped believing it can be one country.
The Norwegian answer is harder. It’s slower. It’s less satisfying when your nervous system wants a wall right now. The Norwegian answer is: we will keep being the kind of place where the king takes the tram. We will protect that with smart, ordinary security. And we will protect it, much more importantly, by refusing to let fear rewrite who we are.
Build the ballroom. Please. And then let’s have the other conversation too. The one about the four million bodyguards. The one about what we owe each other when nobody is shooting.
I’ve written more about family, generational healing, and creating cultures of flourishing in my books. If these themes resonate with you, I think you might find something worthwhile there. We’re all just trying to figure this out together.
