Leadership Quote by Michael Jeffery

The line is engineered to shame passivity without sounding hysterical. Jeffery sets the emotional scene first: not the atrocity itself, but the familiar ritual of consuming it. "Evening news" isn’t incidental; it’s shorthand for a domesticated horror, catastrophe packaged between sports scores and weather. By naming the viewer’s posture - "resignation" and "powerlessness" - he exposes a modern civic alibi: if terror is relentless and global, then ordinary people can only absorb it, not answer it.

"Collectively" is the pivot. It refuses the lone-hero fantasy and quietly indicts individualism as inadequate to the problem. The phrase "must do more" carries a moral imperative while staying conveniently unspecific, the classic politician’s move when the destination is consensus rather than policy. That vagueness is strategic: it invites the broadest possible coalition, from those who want tougher security to those who want community resilience, without committing to any single prescription that might fracture the room.

The subtext is also about media and momentum. Terrorism aims for spectacle; televised repetition can turn citizens into spectators of their own governance. Jeffery’s sentence tries to break that feedback loop by reframing watching as a choice, not a fate. Context matters here: post-9/11 politics trained democracies to treat fear as a permanent weather system. This quote pushes back, not by denying danger, but by insisting that the most corrosive outcome isn’t the act of terror - it’s the slow normalization of helplessness.