Young, hip, naive couple--Georgetown grads--spend a year biking the world

Last week the New York Times ran a story about a young American couple, Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, who decided to quit their humdrum office jobs and go on an epic bike ride and camping trip that would take them all over the world.

Both were graduates of Georgetown University.  Austin, a vegan who worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Geoghegan, a vegetarian who worked in a college admissions office, were both 29 years old.  They planned to bicycle through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Malawi to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  And that was just the start of their planned trek.  After those places they'd do Egypt, Morocco, Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece, to Turkey. From there they'd fly to Kazakhstan and bike more.

Friends warned them about the dangers, but Austin scoffed at the idea that they'd be in any real danger.  A post Austin made on his blog during the trip is revealing:  “You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” he wrote. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted....I don't buy it.  Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.” 

At this point all of you know where this is headed, right?

A friend of Lauren's was concerned when she heard that the couple planned a trek that would last over a year.  She said "This is not the Lauren I know.  Jay changed the trajectory of Lauren’s life.” 

They set off in July of last year.

When white South Africans told them that the black-run government was planning to take land from white farmers whose families had farmed those lands for three centuries, without compensation, Austin wrote of his disdain for their “Eurocentric values” in trying to apply “notions like private property” to African/communist culture. 

While bicycling through Tajikistan five ISIS killers deliberately rammed their car into the adventurers, killing them and two temporary cycling companions.  Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, as they vowed to kill "'disbelievers.”


The story drew hundreds of reader comments.  Most considered the pair “heroic,” “authentic,” “idealistic,” “inspiring,” “a beautiful example of Purity and Light.”  And finally "The good experienced in their journey far far outweighs any negative.”  Several commenters claimed the problem was “religion” in general.

The editors of the Times chose one reader comment as a “Times Pick.”  It reads, 

“A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan.  Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”

And there, dear reader, is the point of my post.  Most readers of the Times--and I suspect most liberals/Democrats--don't believe evil exists.  "There are no absolutes," right?  "All cultures are equally valid," right?

These are two of the key teachings of liberalism.  If you think both are false, what effect do you think these teachings have had on young Americans?

H/T Bruce Bawer at PJMedia.