When a hoax teaches the oldest lesson: Courage first

On Thursday, August 21, at 4:30 p.m., my wife, my youngest daughter, and I stood in the soft light of an overcast day at Villanova University’s welcome Mass. She had earned the right to call herself a freshman. The class of 2029 also carries a distinction: the first freshman class to attend the alma mater of a pope.

Pride did not fully prepare us for what came next.

Everything is an education. Courage, the first of the virtues, does not mean reckless bravado. I learned something about it.

At 4:34 p.m., phones around us buzzed with a NOVA Alert:

ACTIVE SHOOTER Incident Warning
ACTIVE SHOOTER on VU campus. Move to secure location.
Lock/Barricade doors. More info to follow.

My daughter showed my wife the text. As they puzzled over it, the crowd shifted. Chairs toppled with a sound like rain. I briefly imagined a cloudburst pushing people indoors.

The murmur swelled into a surge. People dove to the ground. I had not yet seen the alert. Gunfire? I heard none. A vehicle attack? Lightning? A tornado? A wild animal?

Ancient Greeks saw their gods and the gods of their enemies amid the terror of battlefields. In that instant, the mind supplied its own agents of terror in the convulsing crowd at Villanova.

“Dad, run!” my daughter shouted. She and my wife had already bolted. I jogged after them, but the walkways churned like rapids and they disappeared in the current. I moved into the open at Connelly Plaza to search. Moments later, my daughter called from inside the Connelly Center, urging me to stop standing outside and get to cover. I geolocated my wife’s phone; it registered inside Dougherty Hall.

A heavily armed officer and several others strode past, asking for the library. I pointed as best I could. Someone inside Dougherty waved me in with insistence.

Inside, I found my wife’s purse and phone. Some thoughtful person had picked it up and brought it in. She soon called from a stranger’s phone to say she had reached the Ithan parking garage a little further off. I took up a post with four or five other dads at the glass entrance to Dougherty and waited for the all-clear. It came an hour and a half later.

Everything is an education. Courage, the first of the virtues, does not mean reckless bravado. I learned something about it that afternoon.

Panic spreads faster than any bullet. Faces around me looked as if they had witnessed a threat firsthand. The truth is that most had only read the alert and then seen fear and panic in other people’s faces. That fear became the source of multiplying bad information.

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“Tune our hearts to brave music,” St. Augustine prayed. Villanova’s staff did exactly that. They acted with calm and helped people reach safety. Even so, the hoaxer exposed vulnerabilities. If you have not witnessed immediate danger, move safely and deliberately to a secure place. Don’t fuel the stampede.

Augustine may have also said, “Hope has two beautiful daughters: anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” The hoaxing continued that weekend — one call to the University of South Carolina, another to Villanova. The intent is obvious: inflict physical and psychological harm by weaponizing the consensus response — run and shelter in place.

The threat, paradoxically, comes from hijacking the security system by crying wolf. The remedy must make that hijacking harder, verify and communicate information faster, and reduce harm when the system gets abused. That requires careful thinking about methods and messages — and about courage.

Courage steadies the hands that send the alerts, guides parents and students to act with discipline, and keeps us from trampling one another in a fog of rumor. I watched it in real time from Dougherty Hall. It will be needed again.