Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.

This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.

For example, it gives us one way to explain why we know that racial equality is a feature of a just society: even a prejudiced group of people would probably all insist on a racially equal society if they were asked to design in advance a world into which they would soon be born, without knowing which race life’s lottery would assign them at birth.

To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story.

A sense of loss inclines us, in vulnerable moments, to view the future with an expectation of harm. But when this happens, we miss the power of a well-envisioned future to inspire us toward greatness.