Stories of people who risk their lives to save others.

4 days ago7 min read

There’s a question that lingers, quietly, in the background of our daily lives, especially when the news feels like a relentless scroll of conflict and calamity. It’s a question Larissa MacFarquhar explores with profound empathy in her book *Strangers Drowning*, which studies those rare individuals for whom altruism isn’t a casual impulse but a consuming life’s work.Why do some people run toward the fire, both literal and metaphorical, when every instinct for self-preservation screams to do the opposite? The answer, it seems, rarely lives in grand philosophies or calculated risk assessments. Instead, it emerges in raw, unscripted moments, in the stories of ordinary people who, when confronted with someone else’s peril, simply move.Their actions form a stubborn, essential counter-narrative to the world’s darkness, not as sentimental balm but as a vital part of the human story. Consider Ahmed al Ahmed.At a crowded Chanukah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December 2025, the sound of gunfire didn’t send him scrambling for cover. Video footage shows a moment of terrifying clarity: he ducks behind a car, then sprints directly at a shooter.He wrestles the weapon away and holds the attacker at gunpoint without pulling the trigger himself, an act of restraint as brave as the initial charge. Shot and hospitalized with serious injuries, the Syrian-born Australian later said he acted “from the heart.” His instinct created a shield for dozens. Then there’s Scott Ruskan, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer on his first official mission, who found himself the sole first responder amidst catastrophic flooding at Camp Mystic in Texas.With nearly 200 terrified children and staff looking to him, and weather so severe it turned a one-hour flight into an eight-hour ordeal, he coordinated the helicopter evacuation of 165 people. He deflects the hero label, pointing instead to the courage of the kids on the ground, but in that chaos, his training and composure became a lifeline.The pattern repeats in a Pembroke Pines neighborhood, where Giovanna Hanley and her neighbors heard a plane crash into a tree and saw flames. They didn’t call for help and wait; they ran.Someone brought an axe, another a fire extinguisher, others garden hoses. Working together, they pulled four passengers from the burning wreckage.The mayor called it heroic, but for them, it was just what you do when people are in trouble. In Paris, Fousseynou Cissé faced a different kind of precipice.With toxic smoke trapping families on a top floor, he climbed out a window and edged along a narrow ledge, 65 feet above the ground, to form a human chain. He passed babies and children to safety in an adjacent apartment before helping the mothers across.

#heroism

#altruism

#Bondi Beach shooting

#Texas floods

#plane crash rescue

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