Crisis And Opportunity Quotes

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity.

Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for crisis.

In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.

A Visionaire always takes a step back during a crisis to get out of their own way.

As many know, the Chinese expression for "crisis" consists of two characters side by side. The first is the symbol for "danger," the second the symbol for "opportunity."

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life,the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.

A crisis creates the opportunity to dip deep into the reservoirs of our very being, to rise to levels of confidence, strength, and resolve that otherwise we didn't think we possessed.

How as a young girl, Ismat Chugtai convinced her father to excuse her from learning how to cook, and give her instead the opportunity to go to school and get an education: “Women cook food Ismat. When you go to your in-laws what will you feed them?” he asked gently after the crisis was explained to him. “If my husband is poor, then we will make khichdi and eat it and if he is rich, we will hire a cook,” I answered. My father realised his daughter was a terror and that there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.

When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

Deep within every crisis is an opportunity for something beautiful.

Close scrutiny will show that most "crisis situations" are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are.

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word crisis. One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity.

Keep in mind that whenever you are in a crisis, you are in the midst of danger as well as opportunity.

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

...our free will could convert a curse into a blessing or a blessing into a curse...To transform a crisis into an opportunity was true wisdom

I am a firm believer in preordination—everything happens for a reason. Hence, the logic behind the Chinese symbol for crisis, danger and opportunity. Facing a crisis may present hazards of all kinds, but it also presents opportunities. During a crisis, you learn to survive outside the norm. When you face adversity, see it as an opportunity to learn novel ways to cope.

Poor kids, through no fault of their own, are less prepared by their families, their schools, and their communities to develop their God-given talents as fully as rich kids. For economic productivity and growth, our country needs as much talent as we can find, and we certainly can’t afford to waste it. The opportunity gap imposes on all of us both real costs and what economists term “opportunity costs.

I've got some bad news and I've got some good news. Nothing lasts forever.

Where one person sees a crisis, another can see opportunity. Where one is blinded by success, another sees reality with ruthless objectivity. Where one loses control of emotions, another can remain calm. Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness—these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings.

Challenging injustice means standing up for the weak, the vulnerable, the abused, and the forgotten—be it in health, employment, education, or the environment. It means being vigilant on behalf of people who are treated as pariahs and scapegoats, populations that are dehumanized, displaced, and treated as disposable. It means fighting oppression at every opportunity—no matter the place or country.

The Chinese word for “crisis” also means “opportunity.

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for crisis.” “We

In the Chinese language, do you know what the characters for ‘crisis’ are? ‘Danger’ plus ‘opportunity.

We like to position education as the great leveler. But in fact it has become a caste system, a means of passing privilege on to the next generation.

Crisis is almost a blessing providing cessation of a kind, and with it, the opportunity for change.

Reform is usually possible only once a sense of crisis takes hold.... In fact, crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.

Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore. Because

The end of an age is always a time of turmoil, war, economic catastrophe, cynicism, lawlessness and distress. But it is also an era of heightened challenge and creativity, of issues, and their world-wide scope, never has an era faced a more demanding and exciting crisis. This then, above all else, is the great and glorious era to live in, a time of of opportunity, one requiring fresh and vigorous thinking, indeed, a glorious time to be alive.

It’s not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it’s any comfort, the dark wood isn’t just that. It’s also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn.

What you see as a crisis, God sees as an opportunity for growth. What you see as humiliating, He sees as an occasion for the development of humble leadership. It is all in how you see it. What is your perspective?

what I remember most of all is that I was happy—I no longer feared the school bell at the end of the day, I knew where I’d be living the next month, and no one’s romantic decisions affected my life. And out of that happiness came so many of the opportunities I’ve had for the past twelve years.

We cannot grow without challenge. Challenges routinely produce crises that severely test us. However, crises also offer us the greatest opportunities. People going through tough times typically feel isolated, and unsure what to do. When I face a crisis, I try to keep in mind a few simple concepts: we cannot control our destinies, but we can help to shape them; we must try to make life hop a bit, but we must also accept that we can only do the best we can.

The world is going through a period of crisis, but whether we look at it as a crisis or as an opportunity to reshape our thinking, depends on us. So use this period as a lesson on how to live life with a concern for all of humankind.

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.

The gap between financial capital of US$190 trillion looking for highly profitable investment opportunities and a real economy and social sector without access to the financial capital needed to operate and grow is at the heart of the worldwide economic crisis.

Every crisis offers an opportunity to grow stronger and wiser; to reach deep within and discover a better you that will create a better outcome.

A step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction. —Kurt Vonnegut

No matter what, its always an opportunity.

The good news is that crisis is filled with opportunity.

In some languages, the word for “crisis” is also the word for “opportunity.

There was always an opportunity in crisis, however desperate things seemed.

Where one person sees a crisis, another can see opportunity.

Crisis is opportunity.

The challenges we face in life are not meant to be some sort of punishment; rather, they are an invitation to change — and an opportunity to create something even better than before.

Schools themselves aren't creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and does not grow as children progress through school. The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age 18-powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not - are mostly present at age 6when children enter school. Schooling plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.

As can be seen, ‘crisis’, in its proper sense, expresses something positive, creative and optimistic, because it involves a change, and may be a rebirth after a break-up. It indicates separation, certainly, but also choice, decisions and therefore the opportunity to express an opinion.

What we experience is change, not time. Aristotle observed that time does not exist without change, because what we call time is simply our measurement of the difference between “before” and “after.

Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past thirty years, despite the fact that everyone has a flat-screen TV and can have their groceries delivered. Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore. Because

Families in crisis have wrongly been labeled dysfunctional families. Families are not the problem—they are the opportunity. When we understand ourselves as the opportunity, we see our world with a new vision. We dare to hope for our dreams to materialize. We imagine once again what it will be like to be happy

Like all of us, Boaz must have suffered a crisis of meaning that comes with the financial setbacks of a famine. His community watched him face, and sometimes get defeated by weather and ever decreasing opportunities. But, Boaz stayed. Real men stay. Michael Ben Zehabe, Ruth: a woman’s guide to husband material, pg 51

This is the challenge with owning a restaurant. A large fixed cost—your lease—and little or nothing you can do about it, and because it’s a low-margin business with few sources of funding, there’s typically no capital cushion to survive lean times.

Illness especially, may be a blessed forerunner of the individual’s conversion. Not only does it prevent him from realizing his desires; it even reduces his capacity for sin, his opportunities for vice. In that enforced detachment from evil, which is a Mercy of God, he has time to search himself, to appraise his life, to interpret it in terms of larger reality. He considers God, and, at that moment, there is a sense of duality, a confronting of personality with Divinity, a comparison of the facts of his life with the ideal from which he fell. The soul is forced to look inside itself, to inquire whether there is more peace in this suffering than in sinning. Once a sick man, in his passivity, begins to ask, “What is the purpose of my life? Why am I here?” the crisis has already begun. Conversion becomes possible the very moment a man ceases to blame God or life and begins to blame himself; by doing so, he becomes able to distinguish between his sinful barnacles and the ship of his soul. A crack has appeared in the armor of his egotism; now the sunlight of God’s grace can pour in. But until that happens, catastrophes can teach us nothing but despair.

It was not only for Americans that he was concerned, or primarily the older generation of any land. The thought that disturbed him the most, and that made the prospect of war much more fearful than it would otherwise have been, was the specter of the death of the children of this country and all the world—the young people who had no role, who had no say, who knew nothing even of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else’s. They would never have a chance to make a decision, to vote in an election, to run for office, to lead a revolution, to determine their own destinies. Our generation had. But the great tragedy was that, if we erred, we erred not only for ourselves, our futures, our hopes, and our country, but for the lives, futures, hopes, and countries of those who had never been given an opportunity to play a role, to vote aye or nay, to make themselves felt.

…the things that interrupt our lives, that stop us in our track, can also be catalysts for the emerging self, tools that show us a new way to be, that endow us with new vision. This is why I say that in every crisis there is a transition. Awful things happen and they hurt like hell. And these devastating experiences are also opportunities to regroup and decide what we want for our lives.

Eldridge misunderstood the white radical movement. He exploited their alienation and encouraged young whites to think of themselves as “bad” Blacks, thus driving them ever further away from their own community. At the same time, he seduced young Blacks into picturing themselves as bohemian expatriates from middle-class “Babylon” (as he poetically but mistakenly analogized superindustrial America). So we became temporarily alien to the Black community, while the white radicals were plunged deeper into their peculiar identity crisis. Cleaver’s genius for political and cultural schizophrenia infected us all, Black and white, and the opportunity was missed for youth of both races to express and make concrete their authentic underlying solidarity and love. This still remains to be done.

Don’t strive to be a well-rounded leader. Instead, discover your zone and stay there. Then delegate everything else. Admitting a weakness is a sign of strength. Acknowledging weakness doesn’t make a leader less effective. Everybody in your organization benefits when you delegate responsibilities that fall outside your core competency. Thoughtful delegation will allow someone else in your organization to shine. Your weakness is someone’s opportunity. Leadership is not always about getting things done “right.” Leadership is about getting things done through other people. The people who follow us are exactly where we have led them. If there is no one to whom we can delegate, it is our own fault. As a leader, gifted by God to do a few things well, it is not right for you to attempt to do everything. Upgrade your performance by playing to your strengths and delegating your weaknesses. There are many things I can do, but I have to narrow it down to the one thing I must do. The secret of concentration is elimination. Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing. My competence in these areas defines my success as a pastor. A sixty-hour workweek will not compensate for a poorly delivered sermon. People don’t show up on Sunday morning because I am a good pastor (leader, shepherd, counselor). In my world, it is my communication skills that make the difference. So that is where I focus my time. To develop a competent team, help the leaders in your organization discover their leadership competencies and delegate accordingly. Once you step outside your zone, don’t attempt to lead. Follow. The less you do, the more you will accomplish. Only those leaders who act boldly in times of crisis and change are willingly followed. Accepting the status quo is the equivalent of accepting a death sentence. Where there’s no progress, there’s no growth. If there’s no growth, there’s no life. Environments void of change are eventually void of life. So leaders find themselves in the precarious and often career-jeopardizing position of being the one to draw attention to the need for change. Consequently, courage is a nonnegotiable quality for the next generation leader. The leader is the one who has the courage to act on what he sees. A leader is someone who has the courage to say publicly what everybody else is whispering privately. It is not his insight that sets the leader apart from the crowd. It is his courage to act on what he sees, to speak up when everyone else is silent. Next generation leaders are those who would rather challenge what needs to change and pay the price than remain silent and die on the inside. The first person to step out in a new direction is viewed as the leader. And being the first to step out requires courage. In this way, courage establishes leadership. Leadership requires the courage to walk in the dark. The darkness is the uncertainty that always accompanies change. The mystery of whether or not a new enterprise will pan out. The reservation everyone initially feels when a new idea is introduced. The risk of being wrong. Many who lack the courage to forge ahead alone yearn for someone to take the first step, to go first, to show the way. It could be argued that the dark provides the optimal context for leadership. After all, if the pathway to the future were well lit, it would be crowded. Fear has kept many would-be leaders on the sidelines, while good opportunities paraded by. They didn’t lack insight. They lacked courage. Leaders are not always the first to see the need for change, but they are the first to act. Leadership is about moving boldly into the future in spite of uncertainty and risk. You can’t lead without taking risk. You won’t take risk without courage. Courage is essential to leadership.

Times of crisis and chaos present us with the opportunity to do the best work of our lives. People use words that they pull from the depths of their spirits. People paint with strokes that they summon from their souls. People sing notes that come from the cosmos. People innovate. We must keep doing that.

We’re clearly heading into a period of prolonged emergency, although the crisis will vary between chronic and acute over time. That increases the prospects for revolutionary—or rather, devolutionary—struggle, especially if radical organizations are able to anticipate and effectively seize opportunities offered by particular crises. It’s unlikely that mass support will be rallied for anticivilizational causes in the foreseeable future, because most people are happy to get the material benefits of this culture and ignore the consequences. However, an increase in political discontent can be beneficial even if it doesn’t create a majority.

Most people know that when we are faced with an immediate perceived “threat,” adrenaline kicks in and we experience the “fight or flight syndrome”. Well, the brain also works the same at higher levels of processing. When we perceive a “crisis”, even if we have time to think about it, our brain will perceive it as a “danger” or as an “opportunity”. And… we will act accordingly. And… we will have an outcome based on that perception- danger or opportunity. I try to choose “opportunity” every time.

Communities need tensions if they are to grow and deepen. Tensions come from conflicts within each person - conflicts born out of a refusal of personal and community growth, conflicts between individual egoisms, conflicts arising from a diminishing gratuite, from a class of temperaments and from individual psychological difficulties. These are natural tensions. Anguish is the normal reaction to being brought up against our own limitations and darkness, to the discovery of our deep wound. Tension is the normal reaction to responsibilities we find hard because they make us feel insecure. We all weep and grieve inwardly at the successive deaths of our own interests. . . . When everything is going well, when the community feels it is living successfully, its members tend to let their energies dissipate, and to listen less carefully to each other. Tensions bring people back to the reality of their helplessness; obliging them to spend more time in prayer and dialogue, to work patiently to overcome the crisis and refind lost unity; making them understand that the community is more than just a human reality, that it also needs the spirit of God if it is to live and deepen. I am told that there is a Chinese word for 'crisis' which means 'opportunity and danger'. Every tension, every crisis can become a source of new life if we approach it wisely, or it can bring death and division.

A crisis to address at home becomes an opportunity to mess around abroad.

Many of us have dropped out of the labor force or have chosen not to relocate for better opportunities.

You can’t ignore stories like this when you talk about equal opportunity.

With every animal species that fades to extinction, one more opportunity is lost from the realm of human growth and possibility.

Altruistic behavior decreases in times of greater income inequality. The rich are more generous in times of lesser inequality and less generous when inequality grows more extreme.

Just remember that crisis leads to opportunity.

Crisis is the portal to new opportunity

crisis is both danger and opportunity.

When a crisis is at its deepest, it can offer a huge opportunity. When things fall apart, we can redesign, recast, and rebuild.

In every crisis lies opportunity.

Leadership is turning crisis into opportunity, darkness into light, and hatred into love.

Using crisis as anti-democratic opportunity is a classic fascist tactic.

To keep the ugly cry-face on lock down, I directed my attention to my polished gold Krugerrand coin, which hung against my chest by a thin, twisted gold chain and flashed against my black blouse. It was my Batman signal, alerting the universe that I was in crisis and in desperate need of being rescued immediately, if not sooner. The coin's weight was also a reminder of the reason I'd moved to Gotham City. After all, it was a result of my great-aunt and her one-ounce gold-coin collection that afforded me the opportunity of the life I was leading.

It’s probably someone taking advantage of the situation,” Amaranthe said. “One of my instructors used to say, ‘In every crisis lies opportunity.’” “Yes, politicians have that motto too.

God's principles of national transformation will give the opportunity to make positive changes in the country, overcoming crisis in politics, economy, social services and other spheres.

You will come across obstacles in life -- fair and unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure. You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming -- or possibly thriving because of -- them. Where one person sees a crisis, another can see opportunity. Where one is blinded by success, another sees reality with ruthless objectivity. Where one loses control of emotions, another can remain calm.

Crisis is a window of opportunity that is not obvious to many people and does not last for a long time. We should learn to take advantage of it and come of out as victors rather than victims.

Consumers don’t want more choice, but more confidence in the choices presented. Choice is a tax on time and attention. Customers want someone else to do the research and curate the options for them.

The constant moving and fighting, the seemingly endless carousel of new people I had to meet, learn to love, and then forget—this, and not my subpar public school, was the real barrier to opportunity.

Anchor Your Stories in Redemptive Themes So We Are Moved to Live Up to Them: Rather than making yourself the victim or the hero in the stories you tell, describe a daunting time of loss, crisis, or criticism or where you made a mistake or acted badly, yet you were eventually able to learn from it. Such stories show vulnerability and a desire to grow and live fully rather than in fear. Then that facet of you can be the place where others can positively and productively connect with you, hard-earned strengths firmly attached together. You can support each other in reinforcing redemptive characterizations and action.

Simply thinking creatively is not the same as being innovative, and only those who risk breaking out of their comfort zone by putting thought into action will discover the profusion of opportunity that exists.

Crisis is a window of opportunity that is not obvious to many people and does not last for a long time. We should learn to take advantage of it and come out as victors rather than victims.” —Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

It was this intense self-discipline and objectivity that allowed Rockefeller to seize advantage from obstacle after obstacle in his life, during the Civil War, and the panics of 1873, 1907, and 1929. As he once put it: He was inclined to see the opportunity in every disaster. To that we could add: He had the strength to resist temptation or excitement, no matter how seductive, no matter the situation. Within twenty years of that first crisis, Rockefeller would alone control 90 percent of the oil market. His greedy competitors had perished. His nervous colleagues had sold their shares and left the business. His weak-hearted doubters had missed out.

In a 1959 speech in Indianapolis, John F. Kennedy famously observed that the Chinese word for 'crisis' is composed of two characters, one meaning danger and the other meaning opportunity. It turns out that this is not literally true.

We joke online about “first-world problems,” but we really have become victims of our own success. Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past thirty years, despite the fact that everyone has a flat-screen TV and can have their groceries delivered. Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.

What we feel and how we feel is far more important than what we think and how we think. Feeling is the stuff of which our consciousness is made, the atmosphere in which all our thinking and all our conduct is bathed. All the motives which govern and drive our lives are emotional. Love and hate, anger and fear, curiosity and joy are the springs of all that is most noble and most detestable in the history of men and nations. The opening sentence of a sermon is an opportunity. A good introduction arrests me. It handcuffs me and drags me before the sermon, where I stand and hear a Word that makes me both tremble and rejoice. The best sermon introductions also engage the listener immediately. It’s a rare sermon, however, that suffers because of a good introduction. Mysteries beg for answers. People’s natural curiosity will entice them to stay tuned until the puzzle is solved. Any sentence that points out incongruity, contradiction, paradox, or irony will do. Talk about what people care about. Begin writing an introduction by asking, “Will my listeners care about this?” (Not, “Why should they care about this?”) Stepping into the pulpit calmly and scanning the congregation to the count of five can have a remarkable effect on preacher and congregation alike. It is as if you are saying, “I’m about to preach the Word of God. I want all of you settled. I’m not going to begin, in fact, until I have your complete attention.” No sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as crystal. The getting of that sentence is the hardest, most exacting, and most fruitful labor of study. We tend to use generalities for compelling reasons. Specifics often take research and extra thought, precious commodities to a pastor. Generalities are safe. We can’t help but use generalities when we can’t remember details of a story or when we want anonymity for someone. Still, the more specific their language, the better speakers communicate. I used to balk at spending a large amount of time on a story, because I wanted to get to the point. Now I realize the story gets the point across better than my declarative statements. Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. Limits—that is, form—challenge the mind, forcing creativity. Needless words weaken our offense. Listening to some speakers, you have to sift hundreds of gallons of water to get one speck of gold. If the sermon is so complicated that it needs a summary, its problems run deeper than the conclusion. The last sentence of a sermon already has authority; when the last sentence is Scripture, this is even more true. No matter what our tone or approach, we are wise to craft the conclusion carefully. In fact, given the crisis and opportunity that the conclusion presents—remember, it will likely be people’s lasting memory of the message—it’s probably a good practice to write out the conclusion, regardless of how much of the rest of the sermon is written. It is you who preaches Christ. And you will preach Christ a little differently than any other preacher. Not to do so is to deny your God-given uniqueness. Aim for clarity first. Beauty and eloquence should be added to make things even more clear, not more impressive. I’ll have not praise nor time for those who suppose that writing comes by some divine gift, some madness, some overflow of feeling. I’m especially grim on Christians who enter the field blithely unprepared and literarily innocent of any hard work—as though the substance of their message forgives the failure of its form.

him. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” If

In the past decade, we have transitioned from an innovation economy to an exploitation economy. Innovation is dangerous and unpredictable. It changes market dynamics and creates opportunities for nimble new players to steal share from established players.

So George talked about the two aspects of every crisis: danger and opportunity. If you have the right mind-set, he said, you can make the crisis work for you. You have the chance to create a new identity for the team that will be even stronger than before.

Your confusion will give way to wonder. In wonder you will reign over all things. Your sovereignty will be your rest.” Thomas offers us a vision of a new universe resting on an unshakeable foundation that emerges during midlife. This new foundation is the part of our

I cannot shun the past because it contains information that is useful to script future goals. Looking back into the opaque window of reductive retrospect, what essential opportunities exist today that beckon one to seek with unrestrained enthusiasm? What iridescent signals flare from our conceptual self that if we heedlessly ignore their luminous summons, such deliberate acts of omission will suture the apex of our souls, relegating us to the dreaded curse of mucking along in an ordinary life stalled out by our overweening fear of estrangement?

Costco is well positioned to buck the ugly trends in retail for a number of reasons, including 11 billion of them sitting in its bank account. Honeywell’s $15 billion will likely carry it into a post-corona land of milk and honey. Johnson & Johnson has nearly $20 billion—it’s not going anywhere. Every one of these companies will have their pick of the assets and customers left behind when their weaker competitors shut down. In every category, there will be more concentration of power in the two or three companies with the strongest balance sheets.

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace initiative in 1948, the Israelis assassinated the UN peace mediator, Count Bernadotte, and rejected the suggestion of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), a UN body, to reopen negotiations. This intransigent view would continue; Avi Shlaim has shown in The Iron Wall that, contrary to the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the peace offers that were on the table.

Psalm 111:10. The fear of God. The awe and dread of all that spooky action at a distance. And the Devil was understood to be less an adversary than a particularly evil employee of God. He was that bastard in the Human Resources Department who looks for ways to screw with your life. Satan was real. And he wandered around each day with an eye out for opportunities to tempt ordinary people into sinning. And God allowed it. There was presumably a housing crisis in Heaven or something, and he let Satan roam the earth, tricking people out of their renting privileges in the afterlife.

—so much more opportunity now." Her voice trails off. "Hurrah for women's lib, eh?" "The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed." The apocalyptic word jars my attention. "What do you mean, doomed?" She glances at me as if I weren't hanging straight either and says vaguely, "Oh …" "Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?" Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different. "Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see." Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons. "Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch." No answering smile. "That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a—a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine." "Sounds like a guerrilla operation." I'm not really joking, here in the 'gator den. In fact, I'm wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs. "Guerrillas have something to hope for." Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. "Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City." I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one. "Men and women aren't different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do." "Do they?" Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be "My Lai" and looks away. "All the endless wars …" Her voice is a whisper. "All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we're just part of the battlefield. It'll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—" She checks and abruptly changes voice. "Forgive me, Don, it's so stupid saying all this." "Men hate wars too, Ruth," I say as gently as I can. "I know." She shrugs and climbs to her feet. "But that's your problem, isn't it?" End of communication. Mrs. Ruth Parsons isn't even living in the same world with me.

Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.

Where one person sees a crisis, another can see opportunity. Where one is blinded by success, another sees reality with ruthless objectivity. Where one loses control of emotions, another can remain calm. Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness—these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings. Or, like Rockefeller, choose not to. And it is precisely at this divergence—between how Rockefeller perceived his environment and how the rest of the world typically does—that his nearly incomprehensible success was born.

One man’s real estate crisis is another’s opportunity. All markets work in this way, providing investors with cash the chance to buy—stocks, bonds, real estate, and commodities—when prices are depressed. This reality is devoid of emotional weight and is the basic truth that keeps capitalist economies working.

Families in crisis have wrongly been labeled dysfunctional families. Families are not the problem—they are the opportunity. When we understand ourselves as the opportunity, we see our world with a new vision. We dare to hope for our dreams to materialize. We imagine once again what it will be like to be happy.

The fundamental basis of scientific thought is that an observed truth that undermines one’s understanding is yet the truth. If the observation is not flawed, one’s previous understanding must be. To the open mind, this is not a crisis; it is an opportunity to form a new, more perfect understanding of the world.

Gap years should be the norm, not the exception. An increasingly ugly secret of campus life is that a mix of helicopter parenting and social media has rendered many 18-year-olds unfit for college. Ninety percent of kids who defer and take a gap year return to college and are more likely to graduate, with better grades.

I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and th rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.

there is enormous value in what economists call social capital. It’s a professor’s term, but the concept is pretty simple: The networks of people and institutions around us have real economic value. They connect us to the right people, ensure that we have opportunities, and impart valuable information. Without them, we’re going it alone. I

As Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago mayor and chief of staff to President Barack Obama, famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”8 When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Democrats immediately recognized that it would give them a once-in-a-generation opportunity to radically alter America’s voting laws and procedures to benefit their party.

The result has been disproportionate suffering. Lower-income Americans and people of color are more likely to be infected and face twice the risk of serious illness than people from higher-income households.7 For the wealthy, time with family, Netflix, savings, and stock portfolio value have all increased as commutes and costs have declined.

There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military strength lay overwhelmingly on the side of France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but the will to win was slowly eroded. Troops became demoralised and brutalised. Even a political solution was abandoned. In all three cases the greater power withdrew. The Second World War was an altogether different conflict, but the will to win was every bit as important - indeed it was more so. The contest was popularly perceived to be about issues of life and death of whole communities rather than for their fighting forces alone. They were issues, wrote one American observer in 1939, 'worth dying for'. If, he continued, 'the will-to-destruction triumphs, our resolution to preserve civilisation must become more implacable...our courage must mount'. Words like 'will' and 'courage' are difficult for historians to use as instruments of cold analysis. They cannot be quantified; they are elusive of definition; they are products of a moral language that is regarded sceptically today, even tainted by its association with fascist rhetoric. German and Japanese leaders believed that the spiritual strength of their soldiers and workers in some indefinable way compensate for their technical inferiority. When asked after the war why Japan lost, one senior naval officer replied that the Japanese 'were short on spirit, the military spirit was weak...' and put this explanation ahead of any material cause. Within Germany, belief that spiritual strength or willpower was worth more than generous supplies of weapons was not confined to Hitler by any means, though it was certainly a central element in the way he looked at the world. The irony was that Hitler's ambition to impose his will on others did perhaps more than anything to ensure that his enemies' will to win burned brighter still. The Allies were united by nothing so much as a fundamental desire to smash Hitlerism and Japanese militarism and to use any weapon to achieve it. The primal drive for victory at all costs nourished Allied fighting power and assuaged the thirst for vengeance. They fought not only because the sum of their resources added up to victory, but because they wanted to win and were certain that their cause was just. The Allies won the Second World War because they turned their economic strength into effective fighting power, and turned the moral energies of their people into an effective will to win. The mobilisation of national resources in this broad sense never worked perfectly, but worked well enough to prevail. Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war, however exaggerated Axis ambitions, however flawed their moral outlook. The war made exceptional demands on the Allied peoples. Half a century later the level of cruelty, destruction and sacrifice that it engendered is hard to comprehend, let alone recapture. Fifty years of security and prosperity have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war. Though from today's perspective Allied victory might seem somehow inevitable, the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war. This period must surely rank as the most significant turning point in the history of the modern age.

Life crises, as we pass through them, confront us with polar opposites. Shall we hate or forgive that person? Shall we learn from this experience and grow, or resent it and become bitter? Do we choose to overlook the other person’s shortcomings and our own, or instead do we resent and mentally attack them? Shall we withdraw from a similar situation in the future with greater fear, or shall we transcend this crisis and master it once and for all? Do we choose hope or discouragement? Can we use the experience as an opportunity to learn how to share, or shall we withdraw into a shell of fear and bitterness? Every emotional experience is an opportunity to go up or down. Which do we choose? That is the confrontation.

A function of Rockefeller’s personality: resilient, adaptable, calm, brilliant. He could not be rattled—not by economic crisis, not by a glittery mirage of false opportunities, not by aggressive, bullying enemies, not even by federal prosecutors (for whom he was a notoriously difficult witness to cross-examine, never rising to take the bait or defend himself or get upset).

was actually a function of Rockefeller’s personality: resilient, adaptable, calm, brilliant. He could not be rattled—not by economic crisis, not by a glittery mirage of false opportunities, not by aggressive, bullying enemies, not even by federal prosecutors (for whom he was a notoriously difficult witness to cross-examine, never rising to take the bait or defend himself or get upset).

The opportunity that is concealed within every crisis does not manifest until all the facts of any given situation are acknowledged and fully accepted. As long as you deny them, as long as you try to escape from them or wish that things were different, the window of opportunity does not open up, and you remain trapped inside that situation, which will remain the same or deteriorate further.

remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.

Shame creates lies about how men should think and act, and when men don't fulfill those roles, they have additional shame. We see it play out in one of the greatest and most-ignored crises of our times: homelessness. We largely see it as an economic problem, because it is. It's a result of a lack of economic mobility and opportunity as well as a housing crisis, but it's also enabled by the lies we tell about men.

Sweezy argued on the basis of Marx and Keynes that “accumulation is the primary factor” in capitalist development, yet noted that its influence was waning. “There is no mechanism in the system,” he explained, “for adjusting investment opportunities to the way capitalists want to accumulate and no reason to suppose that if investment opportunities are inadequate capitalists will turn to consumption—quite the contrary.

When I mention the plight of my community, I am often met with an explanation that goes something like this: “Of course the prospects for working-class whites have worsened, J.D., but you’re putting the chicken before the egg. They’re divorcing more, marrying less, and experiencing less happiness because their economic opportunities have declined. If they only had better access to jobs, other parts of their lives would improve as well.

what makes the choice pressing for us now is the absence of any viable middle way. We owe the dearth of alternatives to neoliberalism: that exceptionally predatory, financialized form of capitalism that has held sway across the globe for the last forty years. Having poisoned the atmosphere, mocked every pretense of democratic rule, stretched our social capacities to their breaking point, and worsened living conditions generally for the vast majority, this iteration of capitalism has raised the stakes for every social struggle, transforming sober efforts to win modest reforms into pitched battles for survival. Under such conditions, the time for fence-sitting is past, and feminists must take a stand: Will we continue to pursue “equal opportunity domination” while the planet burns? Or will we reimagine gender justice in an anticapitalist form—one that leads beyond the present crisis to a new society?

In a paper analyzing the data, Chetty and his coauthors noted two important factors that explained the uneven geographic distribution of opportunity: the prevalence of single parents and income segregation. Growing up around a lot of single moms and dads and living in a place where most of your neighbors are poor really narrows the realm of possibilities. It means that unless you have a Mamaw and Papaw to make sure you stay the course, you might never make it out.

In May 1959 Kennedy gave another major foreign policy speech, this time on India and China. Galbraith had helped draft it before leaving on his second visit to India. Kennedy began by saying that “no struggle in the world today deserves more of our time and attention than that which now grips the attention of all Asia. That is the struggle between India and China for leadership of the East, for the respect of all Asia, for the opportunity to demonstrate which way of life is the better.”13

Crisis is the third of the five-part form. It means decision. Characters make spontaneous decisions each time they open their mouths to say "this" not "that." In each scene they make a decision to take one action rather than another. But Crisis with a capital C is the ultimate decision. The Chinese ideogram for Crisis is two terms: Danger/Opportunity - "danger" in that the wrong decision at this moment will lose forever what we want; "opportunity" in that the right choice will achieve our desire.

We’re more socially isolated than ever, and we pass that isolation down to our children. Our religion has changed—built around churches heavy on emotional rhetoric but light on the kind of social support necessary to enable poor kids to do well. Many of us have dropped out of the labor force or have chosen not to relocate for better opportunities. Our men suffer from a peculiar crisis of masculinity in which some of the very traits that our culture inculcates make it difficult to succeed in a changing world.

If our generation has been told for decades that we have so much freedom, so many choices, such opportunities, the question women with young children face is: how free are we to reach for the stars in midlife if we have someone else depending on us? Especially when our concept of good parenting involves so much more brain space and such higher costs than it did for our mothers and grandmothers? And when we expect ourselves to be excellent, highly engaged parents while also being excellent, highly engaged employees?

Neoliberalism is a driving force causing the climate crisis. This is because neoliberalism is a variant of classic liberalism, and classical liberalism builds from the idea that everyone should be granted maximum freedom to pursue their self-interest within capitalist market settings. But neoliberalism also diverges substantially from classical liberalism, and therefore also from the basic premises of orthodox economics that free markets, left to their own devices, will produce outcomes that are superior to government interventions. Here is the problem with neoliberalism, when counterposed against a purely free market model celebrated by economic orthodoxy. That is, what really occurs in practice under neoliberalism is that governments allow giant corporations to freely pursue profit opportunities to the maximum extent. But then government fixers arrive on the scene to bail out the corporations whenever their profits might be threatened. This amounts to socialism for capitalists, and harsh, free market capitalism for everyone else.

A few years ago, in the middle of the financial crisis, the artist and musician Henry Rollins managed to express this deeply human obligation better than millennia of religious doctrine ever have: People are getting a little desperate. People might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like. There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone. To have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic.

Contemporary discussion of inequality in America often conflates two related but distinct issues: • Equality of income and wealth. The distribution of income and wealth among adults in today’s America—framed by the Occupy movement as the 1 percent versus the 99 percent—has generated much partisan debate during the past several years. Historically, however, most Americans have not been greatly worried about that sort of inequality: we tend not to begrudge others their success or care how high the socioeconomic ladder is, assuming that everyone has an equal chance to climb it, given equal merit and energy. • Equality of opportunity and social mobility. The prospects for the next generation—that is, whether young people from different backgrounds are, in fact, getting onto the ladder at about the same place and, given equal merit and energy, are equally likely to scale it—pose an altogether more momentous problem in our national culture. Beginning with the “all men are created equal” premise of our national independence, Americans of all parties have historically been very concerned about this issue.

She told me that she’d had a great day because she’d been watching Lindsay’s son Kameron. “He asked me if he could say ‘fuck’ like I do. I told him yes, but only at my house.” Then she chuckled quietly to herself. Regardless of how she felt, whether her emphysema made it difficult to breathe or her hip hurt so badly that she could barely walk, she never turned down an opportunity to “spend time with those babies,” as she put it. Mamaw loved them, and I began to understand why she had always dreamed of becoming a lawyer for abused and neglected children.

How has my industry raised prices at this rate without improving the product? At a few elite institutions, including NYU, we’ve leveraged scarcity. More than a business strategy, it’s become a fetish—believing you are a luxury brand instead of a public servant. Ivy Leagues have acceptance rates of 4–10%. A university president bragging about rejecting 90% of applicants is tantamount to a homeless shelter taking pride in turning away 90% of the needy that arrive each night. And this is not about standards or brand dilution. In an essay explaining his decision to stop conducting application interviews for his alma mater, Princeton, journalist Bryan Walsh observed, “The secret of elite college admissions is that far more students deserve to attend these colleges than are admitted, and there is virtually no discernible difference between those who make it and the many more who just miss out.” In support, he offered this statement from Princeton’s own dean of admissions: “We could have admitted five or six classes to Princeton from the [applicant] pool.”4 So, with a $26 billion endowment, the question becomes, Why wouldn’t you?

A wide diversity of treatment and social support models needs to be made available to drug users, ranging from one-strike-you’re-out abstinence to harm reduction, methadone maintenance, buprenorphine detox, heroin prescription, and subsidized employment initiatives. Treatment programs also need to take advantage of the moments of life crisis that drive long-term injectors to seek treatment. Most of the spur of the moment, crisis-driven windows of opportunity for changing the lives of street addicts are missed because underfunding, exacerbated by neoliberal audit culture, forces treatment programs to exclude risky patients.

In retrospect, it is easy to see that Hitler's successful gamble in the Rhineland brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in its immense consequences than could be comprehended at the time. At home it fortified his popularity and his power, raising them to heights which no German ruler of the past had ever enjoyed. It assured his ascendancy over his generals, who had hesitated and weakened at a moment of crisis when he had held firm. It taught them that in foreign politics and even in military affairs his judgment was superior to theirs. They had feared that the French would fight; he knew better. And finally, and above all, the Rhineland occupation, small as it was as a military operation, opened the way, as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone, in England) seemed to realize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the parading of three German battalions across the Rhine bridges. Conversely, it is equally easy to see, in retrospect, that France's failure to repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain's failure to back her in what would have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for the West from which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact - as we have seen Hitler admitting - bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by. For France, it was the beginning of the end. Her allies in the East, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia, suddenly were faced with the fact that France would not fight against German aggression to preserve the security system which the French government itself had taken the lead in so laboriously building up. But more than that. These Eastern allies began to realize that even if France were not so supine, she would soon not be able to lend them much assistance because of Germany's feverish construction of a West Wall behind the Franco-German border. The erection of this fortress line, they saw, would quickly change the strategic map of Europe, to their detriment. They could scarcely expect a France which did not dare, with her one hundred divisions, to repel three German battalions, to bleed her young manhood against impregnable German fortifications which the Wehrmacht attacked in the East. But even if the unexpected took place, it would be futile. Henceforth the French could tie down in the West only a small part of the growing German Army. The rest would be free for operations against Germany's Eastern neighbors.

The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity to profit and take whatever you can. The story is as old as the first Thanksgiving. Both the con man and his target want to take advantage of a situation; the difference between them is that the con man succeeds. The financial crisis of 2008 was an extended, flamboyant demonstration of the fact that one of the best bids a person can make for financial safety in America is to get really good at exploiting other people. This has always been true, but it is becoming all-encompassing. And it’s a bad lesson to learn the way millennials did--just as we were becoming adults.

How are we going to bring about these transformations? Politics as usual—debate and argument, even voting—are no longer sufficient. Our system of representative democracy, created by a great revolution, must now itself become the target of revolutionary change. For too many years counting, vast numbers of people stopped going to the polls, either because they did not care what happened to the country or the world or because they did not believe that voting would make a difference on the profound and interconnected issues that really matter. Now, with a surge of new political interest having give rise to the Obama presidency, we need to inject new meaning into the concept of the “will of the people.” The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country. As a result, we have left the job of governing to our elected representatives, even though we know that they serve corporate interests and therefore make decisions that threaten our biosphere and widen the gulf between the rich and poor both in our country and throughout the world. In other words, even though it is readily apparent that our lifestyle choices and the decisions of our representatives are increasing social injustice and endangering our planet, too many of us have wanted to continue going our merry and not-so-merry ways, periodically voting politicians in and out of office but leaving the responsibility for policy decisions to them. Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens. Historians may one day look back at the 2000 election, marked by the Supreme Court’s decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, as a decisive turning point in the death of representative democracy in the United States. National Public Radio analyst Daniel Schorr called it “a junta.” Jack Lessenberry, columnist for the MetroTimes in Detroit, called it “a right-wing judicial coup.” Although more restrained, the language of dissenting justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter, and Stevens was equally clear. They said that there was no legal or moral justification for deciding the presidency in this way.3 That’s why Al Gore didn’t speak for me in his concession speech. You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it. The crisis brought on by the fraud of 2000 and aggravated by the Bush administration’s constant and callous disregard for the Constitution exposed so many defects that we now have an unprecedented opportunity not only to improve voting procedures but to turn U.S. democracy into “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” instead of government of, by, and for corporate power.

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.” I don’t know what happened the day after

Not long after I began thinking about what might help the American working class get ahead, a team of economists, including Raj Chetty, published a groundbreaking study on opportunity in America. Unsurprisingly, they found that a poor kid’s chances of rising through the ranks of America’s meritocracy were lower than most of us wanted. By their metrics, a lot of European countries seemed better than America at the American Dream. More important, they discovered that opportunity was not spread evenly over the whole country. In places like Utah, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts, the American Dream was doing just fine—as good or better than any other place in the world. It was in the South, the Rust Belt, and Appalachia where poor kids really struggled. Their findings surprised a lot of people, but not me. And not anyone who’d spent any time in these areas. In

Nevertheless, as Oppie predicted, the Truman Administration rejected the Soviet response out of hand. Negotiations continued in a desultory fashion for many months, but without result. An early opportunity for a good-faith effort to prevent an uncontrolled nuclear arms race between the two major powers had been lost. It would take the terrors of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the massive Soviet buildup that followed it, before an American administration would propose, in the 1970s, a serious and acceptable arms control agreement. But by then tens of thousands of nuclear warheads had been built. Oppenheimer and many of his colleagues always blamed Baruch for this missed opportunity. Acheson angrily observed later, “It was his [Baruch’s] ball and he balled it up. . . . He pretty well ruined the thing.” Rabi was equally blunt: “It’s simply real madness what has happened.

think it is like this here, when the hurricane comes. Before the hurricane, I am a busy man, and my neighbor, he hurries each day, as well. I do not know him, and we pass on the street, and our eyes are filled with many concerns, and so I do not see him and he does not see me. But the hurricane comes, and there is no electricity, and no light, and we cannot go anywhere for days. I notice my neighbor standing at the fence, and I go out to him and ask if his family is well. I give him cheese and a tin of crackers, and he gives me candles and matches. We stand and talk for many hours, and after this, when we pass on the street, we no longer walk by without seeing.” The tour guide paused, his eyes dark and soulful as he took in the crowd. “This is how the change comes. The storm opens the eyes and then the heart, as well. A crisis is only an opportunity riding a dangerous wind, si?

There is no difference in the objective compatibility between those couples who are unhappy and those who are happy.' Hudson found that couple who feel 'content and warmth in their relationship' don't believe having compatible personalities is the issue. On the contrary, they believe it was their attitude that made the relationship work. The strength of the relationship does not depend on how alike they are, more their willingness to adapt and build a bank of warmth and affection that helps buffer the annoyance of their differences. This supports the concept of the development of compatibility, having a growth mindset('I believe I can change') rather than a fixed mindset ('This is how I am'). Having an attitude of growth means going through difficulties and seeing them as an opportunity to know each other better and bolster the relationship through the resolution of the conflict.

I have always loved the quote from John F. Kennedy: “When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.” Looking back on my life, I can see that I have never had a crisis that didn’t make me stronger. And here was all that I loved before me: great risk, but also great opportunity. I had never felt so excited. Neil was already preparing to come back up. Mick, so fortunate to be alive, was staying firmly, and wisely, at base camp. But for me, my time had come. That evening, camp two was again full of friends. Neil and Geoffrey were there along with Michael and Graham, Karla and Alan. But the weariness of coming back up to camp two again oozed painfully from Karla’s gaunt face. She was utterly exhausted, and you could see it. Who wouldn’t be after three months on Everest, and having got within four hundred feet of the summit only days earlier? Tomorrow the biggest battle of our lives would begin.

Even so, the advance of the far right in Europe and the United States reveals the need to rethink memory work, to adapt it to new generations for whom the Second World War feels like a long-ago crisis. It's important to tell a story people can identify with, a story of ordinary people, the Mitlaufer, and not only of heroes, victims, or monsters. To raise awareness that, if history as such does not repeat itself, sociological and psychological mechanisms do, which push individuals and societies to make irrational choices by supporting regimes and leaders who are opposed to their interests, by becoming complicit in criminal ideas and actions. The most dangerous monster is not a megalomaniacal and violent leader, but us, the people who make him possible, who give him the power to lead. By our opportunism, by our conformity to all-powerful capitalism, which places money and consumption over education, intelligence, and culture, we are in danger of losing the democracy, peace, and freedom that so many of our predecessors have fought to preserve.

Man/Woman, it has always insisted, does not live by bread alone. The weakness of the church is that it has too often accepted the separation between the material and the spiritual … leaving the material to the economic and political power structure.… The crisis of a city like Detroit provides the church with an extraordinary opportunity to develop and practice a vision of a new economy and a new educational system which meets both the material and spiritual needs of human beings.… Churches are … in an excellent position to develop small enterprises that provide models of how to meet the needs of the community and the city and at the same time teach young people the importance of skills, process and respect for Nature. All over the city churches are surrounded by vacant and unused land. If Detroiters, and especially young Detroiters, could see this land being used by churches for organic gardens to supply produce for local needs or to plant Christmas trees for sale at Yuletide or greenhouses where vegetables are grown year round, the idea of a self-reliant living economy to meet the material and spiritual needs of people could come alive.10

It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity it would be Eliot, I fancy, who would demand one's closest attention. He was ready to rewrite the history of all that interested him in order to have past and present conform; he was a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city as a chastisement of human presumption, but also of empire. Tradition, a word we especially associate with this modernist, is for him the continuity of imperial deposits; hence the importance in his thought of Virgil and Dante. He saw his age as a long transition through which the elect must live, redeeming the time. He had his demonic host, too; the word 'Jew' remained in lower case through all the editions of the poems until the last of his lifetime, the seventy-fifth birthday edition of 1963. He had a persistent nostalgia for closed, immobile hierarchical societies. If tradition is, as he said in After Strange Gods--though the work was suppressed--'the habitual actions, habits and customs' which represent the kinship 'of the same people living in the same place' it is clear that Jews do not have it, but also that practically nobody now does. It is a fiction, a fiction cousin to a myth which had its effect in more practical politics. In extenuation it might be said that these writers felt, as Sartre felt later, that in a choice between Terror and Slavery one chooses Terror, 'not for its own sake, but because, in this era of flux, it upholds the exigencies proper to the aesthetics of Art.' The fictions of modernist literature were revolutionary, new, though affirming a relation of complementarity with the past. These fictions were, I think it is clear, related to others, which helped to shape the disastrous history of our time. Fictions, notably the fiction of apocalypse, turn easily into myths; people will live by that which was designed only to know by. Lawrence would be the writer to discuss here, if there were time; apocalypse works in Woman in Love, and perhaps even in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but not n Apocalypse, which is failed myth. It is hard to restore the fictive status of what has become mythical; that, I take it, is what Mr. Saul Bellow is talking about in his assaults on wastelandism, the cant of alienation. In speaking of the great men of early modernism we have to make very subtle distinctions between the work itself, in which the fictions are properly employed, and obiter dicta in which they are not, being either myths or dangerous pragmatic assertions. When the fictions are thus transformed there is not only danger but a leak, as it were, of reality; and what we feel about. all these men at times is perhaps that they retreated inso some paradigm, into a timeless and unreal vacuum from which all reality had been pumped. Joyce, who was a realist, was admired by Eliot because he modernized myth, and attacked by Lewis because he concerned himself with mess, the disorders of common perception. But Ulysses ,alone of these great works studies and develops the tension between paradigm and reality, asserts the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot. Joyce chooses a Day; it is a crisis ironically treated. The day is full of randomness. There are coincidences, meetings that have point, and coincidences which do not. We might ask whether one of the merits of the book is not its lack of mythologizing; compare Joyce on coincidence with the Jungians and their solemn concordmyth, the Principle of Synchronicity. From Joyce you cannot even extract a myth of Negative Concord; he shows us fiction fitting where it touches. And Joyce, who probably knew more about it than any of the others, was not at tracted by the intellectual opportunities or the formal elegance of fascism.

At this point in history, 240 years after its composition, much of the US Constitution simply does not apply to reality. Democrats and Republicans alike worship the document as a sacred text, indulging in delirious sentimentality that was the precise opposite of what the framers envisioned as the necessary basis for responsible government. It’s absurd. The practice of constitutional law in the United States gives absolute significance to meanings that have long since vanished into history. The geniuses who wrote it, and who signed it less than 100 miles from unclaimed wilderness, never imagined for a moment that their plans for a new republic would survive 250 years. They were much too sensible. The founders never desired their permanence. It is only their great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren who conjure the founders into gods among men. Americans worship ancestors whose lives were spent overthrowing ancestor worship; they pointlessly adhere to a tradition whose achievement was the overthrow of pointless transitions. Jefferson himself believed it was the ‘solemn opportunity’ of every generation to update the constitution ‘every nineteen or twenty years.’ Before Trump and anything he may or may not have done, there was already a constitutional crisis. There is no way to govern rationally when your foundational document is effectively dead and you worship it anyway.

The year 1915 was fated to be disastrous to the cause of the Allies and to the whole world. By the mistakes of this year the opportunity was lost of confining the conflagration within limits which though enormous were not uncontrolled. Thereafter the fire roared on till it burnt itself out. Thereafter events passed very largely outside the scope of conscious choice. Governments and individuals conformed to the rhythm of the tragedy, and swayed and staggered forward in helpless violence, slaughtering and squandering on ever-increasing scales, till injuries were wrought to the structure of human society which a century will not efface, and which may conceivably prove fatal to the present civilization. But in January, 1915, the terrific affair was still not unmanageable. It could have been grasped in human hands and brought to rest in righteous and fruitful victory before the world was exhausted, before the nations were broken, before the empires were shattered to pieces, before Europe was ruined. It was not to be. Mankind was not to escape so easily from the catastrophe in which it had involved itself. Pride was everywhere to be humbled, and nowhere to receive its satisfaction. No splendid harmony was to crown the wonderful achievements. No prize was to reward the sacrifices of the combatants. Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat. It was not to give even security to the victors. There never was to be ‘The silence following great words of

My Voice by Paul Stephen Lynch Why was I born? What is my purpose here on this earth? Is there more out there after this life ends? At some point we all ask ourselves these questions. I can tell you with absolute certainty that for me, the answer to all three of these questions is… “I don’t know”. However, what I do know is that while I am here I am meant to learn from my mistakes, to grow through my pain, and to evolve. What will I be changed into? Again, I do not know. Perhaps I will become someone who is more courageous, more charitable, more peaceful, more dignified, more honest and more loving. I am very hopeful but nothing in life is guaranteed. Although, I have discovered that speaking from my heart and telling my truth is an integral part of my transformation. It is my voice. In those times in my life when I have experienced great pain – sadness, loss, conflict or depression – those have been the times that have brought me closest to this transformation. I recently realized that pain is one of the few things that seems to really get my attention and that I have spent a lot of my time just coasting down life’s path. Perhaps this is the reason why I seem to grow the most during the hard times, even though it often takes all the energy I can muster just to get through them. Quite a few years ago, while I was visiting a friend who was dying from AIDS, I saw a tapestry on the hospital wall that read: The Chinese word for “crisis” has two characters. One stands for danger; the other for opportunity. The times in my life that have been the most difficult have quite often proven to be my best opportunities for growth; to get closer to becoming the person I am meant to be. Of course, this doesn’t mean that painful circumstances ~ like HIV and AIDS ~ are good things or that they are in any way “all for the best” ~ or, that they even make any kind of sense. It just means that I know that there is always the possibility that something positive can ultimately come out of that which is incredibly bad. However, change does not happen in seclusion and I will likely need help from friends, family, teachers and even from people I do not know at all For me to continue moving closer to becoming the person I was born to be, I first needed to accept who I am. For me, that was relatively easy (easy does not mean painless mind you) and it happened at the unusually young age of twelve. The second step to transforming my life means I need to tell others the truth about who I am. I have been doing this ever since my personal acceptance occurred. As a result, I have learned that there will always be those people who cannot be trusted with the truth. There are also those who will simply never be able to understand my truth no matter what anyone says to them. However, others will hear the truth very clearly, understand it completely, and even care greatly. Moreover, I can hear, I understand, and I care. I have also learned that there are times when it is better to be silent. Sometimes words are just not necessary… Like when I am sharing with someone who already knows my heart. And then there are times when words are pointless… like when I have already spoken my truth to someone, yet they are simply not capable of hearing what it is that I am saying. This is when I need to find other ears. Sometimes, a silent sign of love is the best way, or even the only way that I can express myself. However, at those times, my silence is a choice that I am making. It is not being forced on me by fear or shame… and I will never let it be because… it is MY voice!

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

If administration actions are not to mock its own rhetoric, the President must now take the lead in mobilizing public opinion behind a new resolve to meet the crisis in our cities. He should now put before Congress a National Emergency Public Works and Reconstruction bill aimed at building housing for homeless victims of the riot-torn ghettos, repairing damaged public facilities, and in the process generating maximum employment opportunities for unskilled and semiskilled workers. Such a bill should be the first step in the imperative reconstruction of all our decaying center cities. Admittedly, the prospects for passage of such a bill in the present Congress are dismal. Congressmen will cry out that the rioters must not be re-warded, thereby further penalizing the very victims of the riots. This, after all, is a Congress capable of defeating a meager $40 million rat extermination program the same week it votes $10 million for an aquarium in the District of Columbia! But the vindictive racial meanness that has descended upon this Congress, already dominated by the revived coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats, must be challenged—not accommodated. The President must go directly to the people, as Harry Truman did in 1948. He must go to them, not with slogans, but with a timetable for tearing down every slum in the country. There can be no further delay. The daydreamers and utopians are not those of us who have prepared massive Freedom Budgets and similar programs. They are the smugly "practical" and myopic philistines in the Congress, the state legislatures, and the city halls who thought they could sit it out. The very practical choice now before them and the American people is whether we shall have a conscious and authentic democratic social revolution or more tragic and futile riots that tear our nation to shreds.

Times of transition are difficult times, times of crisis. But in these times of crisis, with their woes, a new time is already being born. It is precisely in such times that every individual is burdened with an unprecedented, heavy but glorious responsibility: it depends on every individual what comes forth out of this time. It depends on the statesmen, what becomes of the atom bomb, whether it is a curse or a blessing to humanity; and it depends on every single "little" man, the "man in the street," what comes of his life and that of his family in the next few years and decades. Every stone that-literally and figuratively-is laid for today for the purposes of rebuilding, will need to lie there in future decades-and it depends on the way in which it is laid whether the next generation will be able to keep building on this foundation. That is the glorious responsibility of such a time, that we know how many difficulties we have to bear, and yet at the same time how many opportunities we hold in our hands! "He who as a why to live for can bear almost any how," Nietzsche once said. The consciousness of our unprecedented responsibility, which encompasses the future of one's own life, or that of a family, of a work, of a larger society, or of a people, a state even, of humanity, this true "historical" consciousness of responsibility will allow the man of today to bear the "how" of his difficult life circumstances, to shape them, to surmount them. In our struggle full of duties and responsibility every single one of us is indeed called upon. Accordingly nobody has the right to wait "until things become clearer" and to continue to live only provisionally. As soon as we try to shape the provisional, it is no longer provisional! Whether it is the provisional in the big things or the small things-each one of us has to reshape our own "provisional" life into a definitive one. Nobody is allowed to wait any longer-each of us must pitch in-each of us must ask ourselves, as a wise man asked sixteen centuries ago: "If I do not do it-who else will do it? And if I do not do it now-then when?

true—helping a hurting person is a bit scary. We want to do the right thing, not the wrong thing—say what will help, not what will hurt. To add to our confusion, our friend is “not quite herself.” She’s different. We want our friend fixed and back to normal. All you have to do is care. Harold Ivan Smith described the process so well: Grief sharers always look for an opportunity to actively care. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief, but you can wash the sink full of dishes, listen to him or her talk, take his or her kids to the park. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief but you can visit the cemetery with him or her. Grief sharing is not about fixing—it’s about showing up. Coming alongside. Being interruptible. “Hanging out” with the bereaving. In the words of World War II veterans, “present and reporting for duty.” The grief path is not a brief path. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.[1] What can you expect from a friend who is hurting? Actually, not very much. And the more her experience moves beyond a loss and closer to a crisis or trauma, the more this is true. Sometimes you’ll see a friend experiencing a case of the “crazies.” Her response seems irrational. She’s not herself. Her behavior is different from or even abnormal compared to the person not going through a major loss. Just remember, she’s reacting to an out-of-the-ordinary event. What she experienced is abnormal, so her response is actually quite normal. If what the person has experienced is traumatic she may even seem to exhibit some of the symptoms of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). And because your friend is this way, she is not to be avoided. Others are needed at this time in her life. These are responses you can expect. Your friend is no longer functioning as she once did—and probably won’t for a while. You Are Needed You are needed when a person experiences a sudden intrusion or disruption in her life. If you (or another friend) aren’t available, the only person she has to talk with for guidance, support, and direction is herself. And who wants support from someone struggling with a case of the “crazies”? But a problem may arise when your friend doesn’t realize that she needs you, at least at that particular time. Your sensitivity is needed at this point. Remember, when your friend is hurting and facing a loss, you are dealing with a loss as well, because the relationship you had with your friend has changed. It’s not the same.

God has not given us the spirit of fear. He has given us the spirit of Love and a competent mind. Love conquers fear, because Love has Power, that creates a competent mind, that allows a person to make rational decisions and use righteous judgment to resolve or solve problems. Through this God-given process, we are able to endure and persevere in times of hardships, and when facing a crisis. When our spirit is broken by hate, and heavy loads are placed upon us, we turn to God for strength in our storms of life. And we seek his Love to restore us to wholeness. He restores us with Hope. From within him we receive Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance as it is noted in Galatians 5:22. Because of God's Love for us, we are able to have the patience to wait for his Power to restore us so that we are in control of our mind to over-power fear and to lead a successful life to meet our goals and create a greater opportunity filled with his blessings. He has created us to be a victorious people. Therefore, we are able to create far greater opportunities through Love. God gives power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increases strength. (Isaiah 40:29) When we are broken by the storms of life, God's Love restore us. We bow before him, in a humble spirit at his throne of grace, and ask in prayer for mercy and renewed strength. It is here that we find the needed strength to forgive those who have wronged us and the Power to Love. Those who wait upon the Lord, shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31) Fear is powerless. It torments the mind and paralyzes the thought process. It causes panic. Thereby, leaving the person, feeling a sense of hopelessness and unwilling to trust others. It closes possibilities to allow for change. The prophet Isaiah noted; Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. (Isaiah 40:30) And when Jesus disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, "It is a spirit," and they cried out for fear. But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I, be not afraid. (Matthew 14:26, 27) Fear is a person's worst enemy; it causes panic, that results in making irrational decisions. Such behavior is based on poor judgment, that was made due to a lack of patience, to make an adequate investigation of the situation before proceeding. The outcome will create serious problems that can cause serious harm. LOVE is the chain that binds us together. Do not allow hate to separate us. There is One God One family One faith One world We are not defined by belief or by faith nor religion. We are the family of God. Written by: Ellen J. Barrier Source of Scriptures: King James Version Bible

It’s never too late to be who you might have been. —George Eliot

But too many stone rollers still divide themselves between tough love, 12-step models, and the harm reduction model of meeting people where they are with medicine, compassion, and tiny packs of triple antibiotic ointment. Too many still universalize their own personal experience instead of embracing the pluralistic approach that one size never fits all when it comes to addiction. This moment is an historic opportunity to radically rethink addiction care, to do more than give lip service to the throwaway line 'addiction is a disease,' and to treat it like one.

one of them said that the Chinese character for ‘crisis’ is composed of two sub-characters: one that spells ‘danger’ and another that spells ‘opportunity.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

The Third World debt crisis that erupted in 1981–1982 was a near catastrophe for the global economy. It was also a golden strategic opportunity. Over nearly a decade, Washington tied the provision of new lending and, eventually, debt relief to the enactment of pro-market reforms. The debt “can and should be used as leverage,” U.S. officials wrote.

One of the great privileges of a physician’s calling is - often without being truly earned - the opportunity to be present and surrounded by stories in times of crisis.

In any crisis there is opportunity; the greater and more disruptive the crisis, the greater the opportunities.

Industries become ripe for disruption when existing players fail to adopt technological change to improve quality and value, as it may threaten their core business.

Higher education has become a caste system in substantial part because the rich now have a private educational system greasing the skids for entry to the best schools, and poor kids, except the truly exceptional among them, can’t compete.

If you believe in the power of markets, we should be putting money into the hands of consumers, not companies.

My investing advice is simple: I only invest in unregulated monopolies. They aren’t supposed to exist, but our antitrust laws were written in the era of steam engines, and enforcement has been nonexistent.

Express Gratitude: Fill your mind with gratitude instead of negative news programs. All the successful people I’ve studied and have been around practice gratitude. The best entrepreneurs, the best athletes, and the best parents practice gratitude. While most are worried about economic crisis and turmoil, the top 1% are thinking about what they are grateful for and what opportunities lay ahead. They also ask, “What’s good about this crisis?” Imagine how different your thoughts and action would be if you were consistently focusing on the positive, being grateful, and seeing opportunity instead of getting stuck in negativity. What

[Moment of the Primal Hunter (Legendary)] – Instincts ascended to touch upon the concept of time itself. Through your supernatural instinct for survival, you seize the moment of crisis and turn it into one of opportunity. Momentarily slows down time if a blow would otherwise deal substantial damage to the Hunter. The Hunter is unaffected by the slowdown and can move uninhibited for the duration. Has an internal cooldown between each activation. Effect and internal cooldown of the skill are based on Perception.

Both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were a distraction from the real crisis at hand inside the United States

As far as equal opportunity is concerned, it is now well known that children from working-class families often do not have the same educational prospects. In the social competition for opportunity, despite formal equality, those with less cultural capital ultimately remain behind, while those who are better placed from the very start achieve success, sometimes even without special effort on their part.

The lubricant of education is supposed to re-energize the motor of social ascent, yet this is a dangerous process, as it is also possible to slip downward in the educational competition. The expansion of higher education, from which the middle classes particularly benefited over several decades, has been increasingly accompanied by a devaluation of degrees and more intense competition.96 A higher education no longer automatically guarantees a rise in status. If everyone stands on tiptoe, no one sees any better. Education has become a paradoxical medium of ascent; ultimately it is still a means of selection.97 It is principally those already better placed who profit from the increased opportunities. Children from the lower classes often see education as an unreasonable demand, a struggle in which they are going to lose. Middle-class children are in a stronger competitive situation, precisely on account of their qualifications. Children from the upper class, on the other hand, have it easier, as their parents transmit to them greater social and cultural capital, and they can often plug directly into their parents’ networks. They have habitually internalized what matters for the elite—taste, behaviour, culture—and so either rise in a relatively frictionless fashion, or simply remain at the top.98

German reunification not only caused unemployment to rise even further, but also placed an enormous strain on the state budget. The disintegration of the Eastern bloc put further pressure on German capitalism, for it meant not only new markets for German products, but also new geographical opportunities to relocate production. This proved extremely attractive for German companies, which were able to find enough qualified workers at significantly lower wages without modifying their training systems significantly. The introduction of the euro provided Germany with the medium-term advantage that other European countries could no longer counter German wage pressure by devaluating their own currencies. In the end, Germany’s export orientation produced large export surpluses at home, but also caused growing international trade imbalances.

Rahm Emanuel, once gave him. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.

French sociologist Robert Castel sees this as having a dual consequence for individuality.103 Drawing on Norbert Elias’s formulation, Castel sees us as living today in a pure ‘society of individuals’,104 in which there is increasing pressure to behave according to the postulates of competitive individuality. For many members of the middle class this is fine; they are able to take advantage of the opportunities arising and profit from this development, as for them liberation from collective arrangements actually does mean more autonomy and responsibility in the positive sense. They thus often develop an affirmative attitude toward liberalization, seeing themselves in solipsistic fashion as opportunity seekers,105 and thereby threatening to become narcissistic ‘excessive individuals’ (individus par excès).106 The large group of those who fail to keep up in the maelstrom of liberalization, who do not have the same resources at their disposal and often lack the basic preconditions for autonomy, become ‘mere individuals’ (individus par défaut). For them, liberalization and increased social uncertainty are actually threats.

The key concepts of this discourse are no longer social inequality and exploitation, but rather equal rights and identity. Equal opportunity, for example, now aims at the formally equal access of women to positions that were previously reserved for men. The vertical differences between occupational positions—between the female manager of a large corporation and a low-paid female employee of a cleaning company, scarcely play any role in this discourse. The problem with this shift is clearly not the impetus to improve women’s position on the labour market. The problem is that equality policy is limited to this question, as radically equal opportunity reduces justice to the horizontal logic of inclusion and equal treatment. The vertical logic of redistribution is increasingly blanked out.

In short, the more a society is based on equality of opportunity, the more unequal it becomes, and the more legitimate its inequalities. Certainly, the validity of the performance principle is being steadily undermined, yet everyone is still supposed to enjoy the same chances: the losers are accordingly those who deserve to lose, and the winners those who deserve to win. Principles of modernity often continue to exist only as empty husks.

At the end of the day, only very few manage to obtain and make use of a real opportunity: ‘The result is the emergence of two worlds, one of a wide range of life chances and one of exclusion’.108

Populations whose educational progress used to stop at secondary school can now attend university. However, this extension also devalues the qualifications earned, as today there are ever fewer prospects of secure employment with only a school-leaving certificate. As far as the political system is concerned, if the opportunities for citizens to participate are greater than ever before, the actual influence of the lower classes has substantially declined (more on this in the final chapter).

Justice is not a hashtag (The Sonnet) Using a hashtag doesn't make you an activist, Social media trend is not herald of social justice. Justice comes when each lives with accountability, Not when you play pretend justice because it is trendy. A true activist spends their life working for others, Occasionally they indulge in some self-charging activity. Insta-activists spend their life drooling for attention, Humanitarian crisis is just an opportunity for publicity. Human rights violation is just a hashtag for most, So they keep up with the trend by voicing phony endorsement. Once the trend fades 99 percent of those voices disappear, Until the next crisis comes, and the vultures hover again. Violation of human rights is only violation if it is trending. Society that measures social justice by social media trend, is nothing but a bunch of hypocritical, bottom-licking ding-a-ling.

Yogababble basically translates to “We are fascinating people,” rather than “This is a solid company that makes sense for the following reasons.

Advertisers also won’t miss traditional media, since the thing traditional media advertising does best—build mass brands—is increasingly irrelevant as we graduate from the Brand Age to the Product Age. There is a double bind here, because brand equity erodes slowly, and a few months of reduced spend isn’t going to move any needles. Which will make it that much harder even for marketers still attending the church of brand equity to justify returning their traditional media spend to pre-pandemic levels.

Facebook has over 7 million customers, and the top 100 account for only 16% of its revenue.

With 8 million advertisers, and a model that creates immediate opportunity for others when one reduces spend, Facebook possesses the most robust (self-healing, even) customer base in the history of business.

The opportunity for disruption in an industry can be correlated to a handful of factors—a disruptability index. The key signal is dramatic increase in price with no accompanying increase in value or innovation. This is also known as unearned margin. The poster child for this is my sector, higher education. Consider a university lecture. Whether you are 19 or 90, you likely picture the same thing. An auditorium, an older person at the front, a group of young people in the seats, lecture, notes, teaching assistants. Almost nothing has changed in forty years, or even eighty. But there has been one dramatic change—the price. College tuition has increased 1,400% in the past 40 years.1 A red flag for disruption.

Another industry ripe for disruption: healthcare. It’s true that healthcare can claim significant quality improvements in certain sectors—advanced procedures, drug treatments, devices. But many outcomes, like life expectancy and infant mortality, have not improved dramatically. The consumer experience has not improved for most of us. Meanwhile, costs have exploded. The average premium for family coverage has increased 22% over the last five years and 54% over the last ten years, significantly more than wages or inflation.

The youth suicide rate has increased 56% in a decade.36 Girls between 10 and 14 had a tripling of self-harm episodes between 2009 and 2015.37 Teens who are on social media for 5+ hours a day are twice more likely to be depressed than those who are on for less than an hour.38

Government scientists were sidelined, and partisanship swamped sense. Team Blue hates Team Red because they are putting grandparents in danger by not wearing masks. Team Red hates Team Blue because they are infringing on liberty and threatening the economy over something that hasn’t impacted anyone they know. Then, once the virus overwhelmed us, we concocted a flawed economic bailout program. Red-state governors and blue university chancellors opted for politics and money over the health of the country and reopened prematurely.

You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel once remarked, “and what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

The Greek root of crisis is “krisis”—to choose. Solving the climate crisis confronts us with a myriad of choices in redressing social and economic injustice, health disparities, and gender inequality. If we fail in our net-zero ambition, these problems will surely get worse. But here is a more positive outlook: the current emissions emergency is an extraordinary opportunity to address deep inequities that have persisted for generations.

The loss of youth, the faltering of physical powers we have always taken for granted, the fading purpose of stereotyped roles by which we have thus far identified ourselves, the spiritual dilemma of having no absolute answers – any or all of these shocks can give this passage the character of crisis. Such thoughts usher in a decade between 35 and 45 that can be called the Deadline Decade. It is a time of both danger and opportunity. All of us have the chance to rework the narrow identity by which we defined ourselves in the first half of life. And those of us who make the most of the opportunity will have a full-out authenticity crisis.

and prominent intellectual and political elites leaves the playing field open for others to step in and present themselves as advocates for the entire working or middle class or other distinct underrepresented groups. Indeed, politics since 2000 has been marked by the rise of populists—politicians who spurn “out-of-touch experts” and who claim to speak on behalf of millions of people with whom they in fact have no authentic connection, and in whom they have no genuine interest beyond securing votes to support their own often very personal agendas. In America, the first sign of things to come was during the Great Recession, with the emergence of the Tea Party movement in the Republican Party, inside and outside Congress. The movement formed in reaction to the efforts by the administration of Barack Obama to bail out the U.S. financial sector in the midst of the economic crisis. Its members initially presented themselves as fiscal conservatives, calling for the kind of lower taxes and limited government spending espoused by Ronald Reagan. They quickly moved on to oppose the administration’s promotion of universal health care and other social policies, and soon morphed into an activist protest movement supporting new candidates for office with a mixture of conservative, libertarian, and right-wing populist credentials. Many of these Tea Party candidates would later support Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

Perhaps more than anything else, the press conference highlighted—for me, and for the public—just how low America could sink in its own estimation and in the eyes of the world. The country’s long-festering domestic crisis had exploded into view with Trump’s election, and now we were seeing the consequences on the international stage. This, I felt, was the agony of American populism. But it wasn’t over yet.

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

Societies in acute distress often form what anthropologists call “crisis cults,” which promise recovered grandeur and empowerment during times of collapse, anxiety, and disempowerment. A mythologized past will magically return. America will be great again. The old social hierarchies, opportunities, and rules will be resurrected. Prescribed rituals and behaviors, including acts of violence to cleanse the society of evil, will vanquish the malevolent forces that are blamed for the crisis. These crisis cults—they have arisen in most societies that faced destruction, from Easter Island to Native Americans at the time of the 1890 Ghost Dance—create hermetically sealed tribes informed by magical thinking. We are already far down this road. Our ruling elites are little more than Ice Age hunters in Brooks Brothers suits, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright told me, driving herds of woolly mammoths over cliffs to keep the party going without asking what will happen when the food source suddenly goes extinct. “The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge,” the philosopher John Gray wrote. “The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge—not even in the long run.

In nearly all of the country’s nineteen thousand municipalities,117 declining or stagnant property tax revenues, along with mounting costs, have reached crisis proportions. The opioid crisis, the mass shootings, the rising rates of suicide, especially among middle-aged white males, the morbid obesity, the obsession with gambling, the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles, and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires, are the pathologies of a diseased culture. They have risen from a decayed world where opportunity, which confers status, self-esteem, and dignity, has dried up for most Americans. They are expressions of morbidity.

The Global Plan’s most impressive feature was its incredible adaptability – successive US administrations amended it every time bits of it came unstuck. Their policies toward Japan are an excellent example: after Mao’s unexpected victory, and the demise of the original plan to turn the Chinese mainland into a huge market for Japanese industrial output, US policy makers responded with a variety of inspired responses. First, they utilized the Korean War, turning it into an excellent opportunity to inject demand into the Japanese industrial sector. Secondly, they used their influence over America’s allies to allow Japanese imports freely into their markets. Thirdly, and most surprisingly, Washington decided to turn America’s own market into Japan’s vital space. Indeed, the penetration of Japanese imports (cars, electronic goods, even services) into the US market would have been impossible without a nod and a wink from Washington’s policy makers. Fourthly, the successor to the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, was also enlisted to boost Japanese industry further. A useful by-product of that murderous escapade was the industrialization of South East Asia, which further strengthened Japan by providing it, at long last, with the missing link – a commercial vital zone in close proximity.

These two types of equality are obviously related, because the distribution of income in one generation may affect the distribution of opportunity in the next generation—but they are not the same thing.

It is impossible for a bank to issue money with no backing and not run into hyperinflation. History has shown this over and over again to be a FACT, and this is exactly what is going to happen. If you think Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, you are mistaken. There are personal fortunes controlled by the European Rothschild and American Rockefeller clans in the multi-TRILLIONS of dollars, divested into hundreds of tax-free foundations. They wield this wealth and power against us behind the scenes---pulling the puppet strings of our governments and guiding us towards completion of the Great Plan. Money is power, huge money is huge power, and unlimited money is unlimited and omnipotent power. This is what the PRIVATE OWNERS OF THE CENTRAL BANKS OF THE WORLD POSSESS RIGHT NOW---an unlimited money supply for their private owners to use as they wish……….and they are wishing to fulfill the Great Plan of world enslavement. "This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long — We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." -David Rockefeller, speaking at the United Nations, Sept. 23, 1994 The world’s wealthiest and most powerful banking families banded together in the late 1700’s to monopolize the wealth of the world, and thereby the power, and are attempting to bring all of humanity under a fascist-socialist based one world government that they intend to be masters of forever. This is the gist of the Great Plan today: Dominate the world by controlling all the money. When they crash the United States dollar, and they will, we will

The crises in my life eventually served as catalysts to understand that I needed to make different choices to engage higher perspectives. In reading self-help and personal growth books, I began to understand when there is a reoccurring problem, such as the financial hardship we experienced, the underlying higher messages want to be revealed. They will make a continuous unyielding effort to get our attention. The opportunity that lies within crisis is, for you to be willing to look closely and identify the underlying patterns and message in what is happening around you.

The real crisis in any crisis is not the crisis itself. Rather, it is having missed the opportunities within the crisis.

The Chinese write the word “crisis” with the same symbol as the word “opportunity.

Companies with cash, with debt collateral, with highly valued stock will be positioned to acquire the assets of distressed competitors and consolidate the market.

In the pandemic, however, cash is king, and cost structure is the new blood oxygen level. Strong balance sheets mean capital to get through the lean times. Companies with cash, low debt or cheap debt, high-value assets, and low fixed costs will likely survive.

Founders must decide in moments of crisis to view them as danger or as a unique opportunity for change and improvement.