Responding To Crisis Quotes

We can and must respond creatively to the triple crisis and simultaneously overcome dehumanization, economic inequality, and, ecological catastrophe.

I was on a mission. I had to learn to comfort myself, to see what others saw in me and believe it. I needed to discover what the hell made me happy other than being in love. Mission impossible. When did figuring out what makes you happy become work? How had I let myself get to this point, where I had to learn me..? It was embarrassing. In my college psychology class, I had studied theories of adult development and learned that our twenties are for experimenting, exploring different jobs, and discovering what fulfills us. My professor warned against graduate school, asserting, "You're not fully formed yet. You don't know if it's what you really want to do with your life because you haven't tried enough things." Oh, no, not me.." And if you rush into something you're unsure about, you might awake midlife with a crisis on your hands," he had lectured it. Hi. Try waking up a whole lot sooner with a pre-thirty predicament worm dangling from your early bird mouth. "Well to begin," Phone Therapist responded, "you have to learn to take care of yourself. To nurture and comfort that little girl inside you, to realize you are quite capable of relying on yourself. I want you to try to remember what brought you comfort when you were younger." Bowls of cereal after school, coated in a pool of orange-blossom honey. Dragging my finger along the edge of a plate of mashed potatoes. I knew I should have thought "tea" or "bath," but I didn't. Did she want me to answer aloud? "Grilled cheese?" I said hesitantly. "Okay, good. What else?" I thought of marionette shows where I'd held my mother's hand and looked at her after a funny part to see if she was delighted, of brisket sandwiches with ketchup, like my dad ordered. Sliding barn doors, baskets of brown eggs, steamed windows, doubled socks, cupcake paper, and rolled sweater collars. Cookouts where the fathers handled the meat, licking wobbly batter off wire beaters, Christmas ornaments in their boxes, peanut butter on apple slices, the sounds and light beneath an overturned canoe, the pine needle path to the ocean near my mother's house, the crunch of snow beneath my red winter boots, bedtime stories. "My parents," I said. Damn. I felt like she made me say the secret word and just won extra points on the Psychology Game Network. It always comes down to our parents in therapy.

We each possess the ability creatively to respond to the ontological mystery of our existence.

We do not always respond to shocks with regression. Sometimes, in the face of crisis, we grow up—fast.

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one. In the very same way, if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when elite interests are in peril.

How many graves has the government of Michigan set aside for the casualties of the water crisis that will end with a gunshot in fifteen years’ time? We all know how cops respond to kids of color with intellectual disabilities or mental illness.

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises — car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change. When the crisis is environmental and global,

In times of crisis, day laborers are often the first responders,” one labor organizer told me.

The church is the hands and feet of Jesus, and it is our duty to continue the mandate to protect the innocent, while turning perpetrators in to the proper authorities.

A perpetrator may have hurt someone for a few minutes of his/her life and may even regret it, but the survivor lives with the pain, triggers, shame and fear for a lifetime.

Does it take a time of crisis for us to see the plight of the homeless? Must they be escaping a war zone to be in need? As a people, can we only respond to need if we perceive it to be valid?

This is the critical point of this book: if you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses—but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically. A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises — car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change.

Think of the corporate manager who gets two hundred emails per day and spends his time responding pell-mell to an incoherent press of demands. The way we experience this, often, is as a crisis of self-ownership: our attention isn’t simply ours to direct where we will, and we complain about it bitterly. Yet this same person may find himself checking his email frequently once he gets home or while on vacation. It becomes effortful for him to be fully present while giving his children a bath or taking a meal with his spouse. Our changing technological environment generates a need for ever more stimulation. The content of the stimulation almost becomes irrelevant. Our distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to—that is, what to value.

We aren’t disciples in midair without bodies, histories, personalities, relationships and much more. We begin to follow by responding to Jesus’ invitation where we are.

People are more apt to respond to crisis, than to their dreams and vision. Dare not be one of them.

The church is not a place for perfection. It is, and should be, a haven of protection.

All throughout Torah, we find people looking for God, and not finding God, because God doesn't often conform to our expectations. God is somewhere other than the place we think to look. And our sages show that you can respond to God's hiddenness in many different ways. You can, like the writer of Lamentations, respond to God's hiddenness by mourning. Or, like the writer of Ecclesiastes, instead of asking where the God you thought you were looking for had gone, ask what God is like now. Or you can respond to God's hiddenness by being like Esther: if God is hiding, then you must act on God's behalf. If you look around the world and wonder where God has gone, why God isn't intervening on behalf of just and righteous causes, your very wondering may be a nudge to work in God's stead.

We are to be agents of His great upside down Kindgom, where the outcasts are listened to, the broken are given dignity, and those suffering under the weight of sexual exploitation are rescued and healed.

In a moment of crisis we don't act out of reasoned judgment but on our conditioned reflexes. We may be able to send men to the moon, but we'd better remember we're still closely related to Pavlov's dog. Think about driving a car: only the beginning driver thinks as he performs each action; the seasoned driver's body works kinesthetically . . .A driver prevents an accident because of his conditioned reflexes; hands and feet respond more quickly than thought. I'm convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we've made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors, as our points of reference. If our slow and reasoned decisions are generally wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too. If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will be those of the sudden situation.

Whether plagues are managed quickly doesn't just depend on hardworking doctors and scientists. It depends on people who like to sleep in on weekends and watch movies and eat French fries and do the fantastic common things in life, which is to say, it depends on all of us. Whether a civilization fares well during a crisis has a great deal to do with how the ordinary, nonscientist citizen responds. A lot of the measures taken against plagues discussed in this book will seem stunningly obvious. You should not, for instance, decide diseased people are sinners and burn them at a literal or metaphorical stake, because it is both morally monstrous and entirely ineffective. But them a new plague crops up, and we make precisely the same mistakes we should have learned from three hundred years ago.

If there is anything we can take away from them, it is the wisdom of employing this two-step process, especially in times of mind-bending crisis: Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond.

scale. The American institutions built to manage risk and respond to a virus had been engaged in a weird simulation of crisis response that did not involve actually trying to stop the virus. “The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,

This is not how you thought it would be. Time has stopped. Nothing feels real. Your mind cannot stop replaying the events, hoping for a different outcome. The ordinary, everyday world that others still inhabit feels coarse and cruel. You can’t eat (or you eat everything). You can’t sleep (or you sleep all the time). Every object in your life becomes an artifact, a symbol of the life that used to be and might have been. There is no place this loss has not touched. In the days and weeks since your loss, you’ve heard all manner of things about your grief: They wouldn’t want you to be sad. Everything happens for a reason. At least you had them as long as you did. You’re strong and smart and resourceful—you’ll get through this! This experience will make you stronger. You can always try again—get another partner, have another child, find some way to channel your pain into something beautiful and useful and good. Platitudes and cheerleading solve nothing. In fact, this kind of support only makes you feel like no one in the world understands. This isn’t a paper cut. It’s not a crisis of confidence. You didn’t need this thing to happen in order to know what’s important, to find your calling, or even to understand that you are, in fact, deeply loved. Telling the truth about grief is the only way forward: your loss is exactly as bad as you think it is. And people, try as they might, really are responding to your loss as poorly as you think they are. You aren’t crazy. Something crazy has happened, and you’re responding as any sane person would.

we live on a live planet that can respond to the changes we make, either by cancelling the changes or by cancelling us.

Polarization (and Trumpism) is in itself a kind of political crisis. But all of this would be fine in the long run, if the stakes weren’t so high and the time frames so narrow. As a world-system, we really don’t have the time for Trumpism and the like. Global warming and the rapid changes pertaining to the internet age won’t wait. We are entering a time of unprecedented transformation and we are in dire need of politics that are progressive—in the sense that they anticipate and productively respond to the upcoming multidimensional crisis—revolution.

Texas responded to the crisis differently than California. Texas took its status as a formerly independent republic very seriously. About two days into the mess, the Governor of Texas held a press conference and said what would become famous words, “If the Federal Government can’t restore law and order to Texas, then Texas will. We entered this union of states voluntarily and we can leave it voluntarily. And from what I’ve seen, the Federal Government can’t do much of anything right, so we don’t think they can stop us. Texas will take care of Texans. Period.

Just like a garden that flourishes best under certain conditions, your home operates more smoothly when the emotional climate is well thought out. Rather than simply reacting to each crisis and circumstance as it arises, setting an emotional climate gives you a head start in fending off potential sources of stress and conflict. It helps you respond to life rather than react to it.

Food in our society is a chronic poverty need, not a life-threatening one. And when we respond to a chronic need as though it were a crisis, we can predict toxic results: dependency, deception, disempowerment.

Para que una nación compuesta por millones de individuos divididos en grupos con perspectivas contrarias sobre la identidad de su territorio pueda responder a la pregunta de «¿quiénes somos?», hace falta mucho más que el paso del tiempo.

The more militant anticapitalism and international solidarity became everyday features of U.S. antiracist activism, the more vehemently the state responded by, as Allen Feldman (1991) puts it, “individualizing disorder” into singular instances of criminality.

Every person’s story contains chapters of pain and loss, victory and defeat, love and hate, pride and prejudice, courage and fear, faith and self-distrust, charity and kindness, selfishness and jealously. Every person’s story also contains folios of hopefulness and truthfulness, deceit and despair, action and change, passion and compassion, excitement and boredom, birth and creation, mutation and defect, generation and preservation, delusions and illusions, imagination and fantasy, bafflement and puzzlement. What makes a person’s selfsame story unique is how he or she organizes the pure and impure forces that comprise them, how they respond to internal and external crisis, if they act in a safeguarding and humble manner, or lead a self-seeking and destructive existence.

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the ’73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.)

Whether a civilization fares well during a crisis has a great deal to do with how the ordinary, nonscientist citizen responds. A lot of the measures taken against the plagues discussed in this book will seem stunningly obvious. You should not, for instance, decide diseased people are sinners and burn them at a literal or metaphorical stake, because it is both morally monstrous and entirely ineffective. Everyone would probably theoretically agree with this statement. But then a new plague crops up, and we make precisely the same mistakes we should have learned from three hundred years ago.

human imagination is a poor tool for judging risk. People are really good at responding to the crisis that just happened, as they naturally imagine that whatever just happened is most likely to happen again. They are less good at imagining a crisis before it happens—and taking action to prevent it.

Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a “crisis” trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the force of their personalities.

A security crisis also facilitated Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian turn. In September 1999, shortly after Putin was named prime minister, a series of bombings in Moscow and other cities—presumably by Chechen terrorists—killed nearly three hundred people. Putin responded by launching a war in Chechnya and a large-scale crackdown

The Emperor Napoleon is said to have confronted Cardinal Consalvi, the secretary of state to Pope Pius VII, saying that he, Napoleon, would destroy the Church—to which the Cardinal deftly responded, “Oh my little man, you think you’re going to succeed in accomplishing what centuries of priests and bishops have tried and failed to do?

This book aims to learn from that mistake. One of its goals is to ask whether Minsky’s demand for a theory that generates the possibility of great depressions is reasonable and, if so, how economists should respond. I believe it is quite reasonable. Many mainstream economists react by arguing that crises are impossible to forecast: if they were not, they would either already have happened or been forestalled by rational agents. That is certainly a satisfying doctrine, since few mainstream economists foresaw the crisis, or even the possibility of one. For the dominant school of neoclassical economics, depressions are a result of some external (or, as economists say, ‘exogenous’) shock, not of forces generated within the system.

By rebuilding community, we will renew democracy and the hope we invest in it. We will develop political systems that are not so big that they cannot respond to us but not so small that they cannot meet the problems we face. We will achieve something that, paradoxically, we cannot realise alone: self-reliance. By helping each other, we help ourselves. The strong, embedded cultures

Training in de-escalation techniques is at the heart of such instruction. And, when you think about it, of all the skills a police officer needs—pursuit driving; traffic enforcement; responding to crimes in progress; crime scene protection; interviewing witnesses; interrogating suspects; the identification, collection and preservation of evidence; use of force, including lethal force; defensive tactics; arrest and control, and more—the mastery of de-escalation techniques is arguably the most valuable tool in a police officer’s tradecraft kit. At any given moment, in any given situation, the person a cop is dealing with—in crisis or not—can “escalate,” that is, become a danger to self or others. De-escalation is a literal lifesaver. And, today, it is the talk of the nation.

the gospel is good news for losers, that in fact we are all losers if we measure ourselves by God’s interpretation of reality rather than our own. The demand for glory, power, comfort, autonomy, health, and wealth creates a vicious cycle of craving and disillusionment. It even creates its own industry of therapists and exercise, style, and self-esteem gurus—and churches—to massage the egos wounded by this hedonism. When crisis hits, the soul is too effete to respond appropriately. We become prisoners of our own felt needs, which were inculcated in us in the first place by the very marketplace that promises a “fix.” We become victims of our own shallow hopes. We are too easily disappointed because we are too easily persuaded that the marketplace always has something that can make us happy.

The accused and the magistrate next engaged in a dialogue about what constituted witchcraft. If she had not signed the book, had she dealt with “familiar Spirits”? If not, how could her apparition hurt the afflicted? Hathorne observed that “you seem to act witchcraft before us, by the motion of your body.” When Bishop responded, “I know not what a Witch is,” Hathorne pounced. “How do you know then that you are not a witch?

It was 1977. Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin’s ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero. In the Bronx, Herc’s time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements—the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

One day, UD officers met to review events at their respective posts. A bewildered new officer arrived. “Hey, you’ll never believe it, but I passed the First Lady, and she told me to go to hell!” A second young officer responded, “You think that’s bad? I passed her on the West Colonnade, and all I said was ‘Good morning, First Lady.’ She told me, ‘Go f—yourself.’” “Are you serious?” “‘Go f—yourself’!” He imitated her, pointing a finger.

we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us. ”(…) That’s tough for a lot of people in important positions to accept, since it challenges something that might be even more powerful than capitalism, and that is the fetish of centrism—of reasonableness, seriousness, splitting the difference, and generally not getting overly excited about anything. This is the habit of thought that truly rules our era, far more among the liberals who concern themselves with matters of climate policy than among conservatives, many of whom simply deny the existence of the crisis. Climate change presents a profound challenge to this cautious centrism because half measures won’t cut it. (…) The challenge, then, is not simply that we need to spend a lot of money and change a lot of policies; it’s that we need to think differently, radically differently, for those changes to be remotely possible. Right now, the triumph of market logic, with its ethos of domination and fierce competition, is paralyzing almost all serious efforts to respond to climate change. (…) It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities,

We need to respond to our present ecological crisis practically, by making appropriate social, political, economic, and technological changes. We need to look at the attitudes that have led to such devastation of the earth and to find a more harmonious way of living. And those of us who believe in the power of prayer need to pray for forgiveness and guidance. If a wiser and juster human order comes about, if a new harmony develops between humanity and the living world, this would indeed seem like an answer to prayer.

Parents should not wait until their child’s behavior becomes unacceptable before they commence training—which would then actually be discipline. Training is not discipline. Discipline is the “damage control” part of training, but is insufficient in itself to effect proper behavior. Training is the conditioning of the child’s mind before the crisis arises. It is preparation for future, instant, unquestioning obedience. An athlete trains before he competes. Animals, including wild ones, are conditioned to respond to the trainer’s voice command.

Codependents may: think and feel responsible for other people—for other people’s feelings, thoughts, actions, choices, wants, needs, well-being, lack of well-being, and ultimate destiny. feel anxiety, pity, and guilt when other people have a problem. feel compelled—almost forced—to help that person solve the problem, such as offering unwanted advice, giving a rapid-fire series of suggestions, or fixing feelings. feel angry when their help isn’t effective. anticipate other people’s needs. wonder why others don’t do the same for them. find themselves saying yes when they mean no, doing things they don’t really want to be doing, doing more than their fair share of the work, and doing things other people are capable of doing for themselves. not know what they want and need or, if they do, tell themselves what they want and need is not important. try to please others instead of themselves. find it easier to feel and express anger about injustices done to others, rather than injustices done to themselves. feel safest when giving. feel insecure and guilty when somebody gives to them. feel sad because they spend their whole lives giving to other people and nobody gives to them. find themselves attracted to needy people. find needy people attracted to them. feel bored, empty, and worthless if they don’t have a crisis in their lives, a problem to solve, or someone to help. abandon their routine to respond to or do something for somebody else. overcommit themselves. feel harried and pressured. believe deep inside other people are somehow responsible for them. blame others for the spot the codependents are in. say other people make the codependents feel the way they do. believe other people are making them crazy. feel angry, victimized, unappreciated, and used. find other people become impatient or angry with them for all the preceding characteristics. LOW

We saw that four different voices respond to this crisis by suggesting differing pathways forward: the first three are the retro-voices, which suggest returning to the global field structure of Field 1 (autocratic and state-driven: regulation, law and order), Field 2 (market-driven: deregulation), or Field 3 (stakeholder negotiation-driven: dialogue), respectively. The fourth voice, however, suggests that there is no way back. Retreat is impossible because circumstances have changed. This is why we need to go forward to the next evolutionary stage of the global economy (ecosystem-driven: seeing and acting from the emerging whole).

Being a brash entrepreneur, Roberts responded to the crisis by deciding to launch a whole new business. He had always been fascinated by computers, and he assumed that other hobbyists felt the same. His goal, he enthused to a friend, was building a computer for the masses that would eliminate the Computer Priesthood once and for all. After studying the instruction set for the Intel 8080, Roberts concluded that MITS could make a do-it-yourself kit for a rudimentary computer that would be so cheap, under $400, that every enthusiast would buy it. “We thought he was off the deep end,” a colleague later confessed.112 Ed Roberts (1941–2010).

didn’t know how to be mad at people yet, so I just aped the behaviour I had seen at home: speaking to someone in tight, terse little sentences until they went insane. It was how my mother fought with me, how I fought with my younger brothers, and how they fought with their friends. It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged. People were always wronging us. That the most recent economic crisis had devastated my parents’ business and depleted their investments was yet more proof that the world was out to get the Murrays. We were responding, at that time, by giving the world the cold shoulder.

Calm: You can stay calm in a crisis. 2.    Clarity: You can see clearly what’s happening as well as your internal response to what’s happening; you can see what needs to happen next; and you can see possibilities from different perspectives that will enhance your ability to respond flexibly. 3.    Connection: You can reach out for help as needed; you can learn from others how to be resilient; and you can connect to resources that greatly expand your options. 4.    Competence: You can call on skills and competencies that you have learned through previous experience (or that you learn through Bouncing Back) to act quickly and effectively. 5.    Courage: You can strengthen your faith to persevere in your actions until you come to resolution or acceptance of the difficulty. Bouncing

Faith is not discussed as an abstraction in the gospels. Jesus does not talk about it so much as respond to it in other people, for example, saying to a woman who has sought him for a healing, “thy faith hath made thee whole” (Matt. 9:22, KJV). And faith is not presented as a sure thing. Among Jesus’ disciples Peter is the one whose faith is most evident, always eager. Then, in the crisis of Jesus’ arrest and trial, Peter is the disciple who denies him three times. I do not know the man, he says, and weeps. The relentlessly cheerful and positive language about faith that I associate with the strong-arm tactics of evangelism fails to take this biblical ambiguity into account. I appreciate much more the wisdom of novelist Doris Betts’s assertion that faith is “not synonymous with certainty ... [but] is the decision to keep your eyes open.

She woke to find dawn light, pearly silver tinged with pink, washing into the room. For a moment, she wondered what had woken her, then she glanced at Breckenridge-into his hazel eyes. "You're awake!" She only just managed not to squeal. The joy leaping through her was near impossible to contain. He smiled weakly. His lids drooped, fell. "I've been awake for some time, but didn't want to wake you." His voice was little more than a whisper. She realized it was the faint pressure of his fingers on hers that had drawn her rom sleep. Those fingers, his hand, were no longer over-warm. Reaching out, she laid her fingers on his forehead. "Your temperature's normal-the fever's broken. Thank God." Retrieving her hand, refocusing on his face, she felt relief crash through her in a disorienting, almost overpowering wave. "You have to rest." That was imperative; she felt driven by flustered urgency to ensure he understood. "You're mending nicely. Now the crisis has passed, you'll get better day by day. Catriona says that with time you'll be as good as new." Algaria had warned her to assure him of that. He swallowed; eyes closed, he shifted his head in what she took to be a nod. "I'll rest in a minute. But first...did you mean what you said out there by the bull pen? That you truly want a future with me?" "Yes." She clutched his hand more tightly between hers. "I meant every word." His lips curved a fraction, then he sighed. Eyes still closed-she sensed he found his lids too heavy to lift-he murmured, "Good. Because I meant every word, too." She smiled through sudden tears. "Even about our daughters being allowed to look like Cordelia?" His smile grew more definite. "Said that aloud, did I? Yes, I meant that, but for pity's sake don't tell her--she'll never let me hear the end of it, and Constance will have my head to boot." His words were starting to slur again; he was slipping back into healing sleep. Catriona's words, her warning, rang in Heather's head. She remembered her vow. Rising, she leaned over him; his hand still clasped between hers, and kissed him gently. "Go to sleep and get well, but before you do, I need to tell you this. I love you. I will until the end of my days. I don't expect you to love me back, but that doesn't matter anymore. You have my love regardless, and always will." She kissed him again, sensed he'd heard, but that he was stunned, surprised. He didn't respond. She drew back. "And now you need to put your mind to getting better. We have a wedding to attend, after all." She knew he heard that-his features softened, eased. As he slid into sleep, he was, very gently, smiling.

It is critical to recognize that we live in an increasingly complex world - biologically, socially, politically, technologically, you name it - that holds many inherent contradictions. In the middle of this complex world are we humans, who have a natural tendency to seek coherence in what we see, feel, think, and do. When we experience conflict, this tendency intensifies. Conflict is essentially a contradiction, an incompatibility, oppositely directed forces, and a difference that triggers tension. When we encounter conflict, within the field of forces that constitute it, the natural human tendency is to reduce that tension by seeking coherence through simplification. Research shows that this tendency toward simplification becomes even more intensified when we are under stress, threat, time constraints, fatigue, and various other conditions all absolutely typical of conflict. So what is the big idea? It is NOT that coherence is bad and complexity is good. Coherence seeking is simply a necessary and functional process that helps us interpret and respond to our world efficiently and (hopefully) effectively. And complexity in extremes is a nightmare - think of Mogadishu, Somalia, in the 1990s or the financial crisis of 2009 or Times Square during rush hour on a Friday afternoon. On the other hand, too much coherence can be just as pathological: for example, the collapse of the nuances and contradictions inherent in any conflict situation into simple 'us versus them' terms, or a deep commitment to a rigid understanding of conflicts based on past sentiments and obsolete information. Either extreme - overwhelming complexity or oversimplified coherence - is problematic. But in difficult, long-term conflicts, the tide pulls fiercely toward simplification of complex realities. This is what we must content with.

Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible. Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children. We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause. The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.

The Catholic Church also opposes any effort to make it easier to deport children; last week, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis E. George, said he had offered facilities in his diocese to house some of the children, and on Monday, bishops in Dallas and Fort Worth called for lawyers to volunteer to represent the children at immigration proceedings. “We have to put our money where our mouth is in this country,” said Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “We tell other countries to protect human rights and accept refugees, but when we get a crisis on our border, we don’t know how to respond.” Republicans have rejected calls by Democrats for $2.7 billion in funds to respond to the crisis, demanding changes in immigration law to make it easier to send children back to Central America. And while President Obama says he is open to some changes, many Democrats have opposed them, and Congress is now deadlocked.

One day, UD officers met to review events at their respective posts. A bewildered new officer arrived. “Hey, you’ll never believe it, but I passed the First Lady, and she told me to go to hell!” A second young officer responded, “You think that’s bad? I passed her on the West Colonnade, and all I said was ‘Good morning, First Lady.’ She told me, ‘Go f—yourself.’” “Are you serious?” “‘Go f—yourself’!” He imitated her, pointing a finger. We were stunned but not all of us were surprised. Our sergeant challenged him, but another officer soon corroborated his story. Our sergeant was speechless. We assured the rookie that this wasn’t the job’s normal atmosphere—at least, not under the previous administration. The sergeant fumed and called the watch commander, who pushed things up the Secret Service chain of command, who said they’d forward it to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. The Service circulated a memo reminding everyone to report any “unusual” First Family interaction to their supervisors.

for the teens who were the first one that classmate with the wild hair and the dark makeup and the frightened eyes told about the things that were happening at home. the secret keepers, the unpaid crisis responders, the ones who took frantic calls at all hours of the night and went to the high school guidance counselor ostensibly for assessment for therapy, for support for the scars on their arms, but mostly to figure out how to become therapists themselves, because no adult can help a kid the way another kid can. for the ones who grew up to be social workers and nurses and psychologists and any other flavor of professional helper, because they were already doing the helping, so they might as well get paid for it too. because helping and holding and listening and caring were the only times we felt we knew what we were doing, even though we had no idea. because that was the way that other people loved us. because maybe, we thought in our secret hearts, that’s all we were good for. caregiver, i see you.

Withdrawal from the world or accepting simplistic answers reveals human effort or human problem solving, while lament acknowledges who is ultimately in control. In the midst of a crisis, Lamentations points toward God and acknowledges his sovereignty regardless of the circumstances. Lamentations 1:1-3 reminds us of Jerusalem’s story by contrasting the past glory with the anguish of the present crisis. A dramatic change of fortune is demonstrated. The reality of this destruction presents the challenge of the book of Lamentations. How will God’s people respond? Will they only look for the answers they want to hear? Will they run and hide, or will they enter into the place of lament and embrace the reality of their situation? The historical context of the fall of Jerusalem as revealed in Lamentations 1:1-3 and Jeremiah 29:4-9 points to the necessity of Lamentations. By challenging the two primary temptations facing the exiles, Scripture now points the people of God toward the proper response to a broken world: lament.

Throughout history, white women have chosen racial solidarity with white men over gender solidarity with women of color in an attempt to gain access to the fruits of capitalist triumph. An alternative to that erroneous path is to choose solidarity with other women, other mothers in particular: to seek the resonances between our lives so that we may begin to repair the gaps. Erich Fromm wrote 'Important and radical changes are necessary if love is to become a social and not highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.' I asked Erin Spahr of the Perinatal Mood Disorders clinic at Johns Hopkins what her strategies were for low-income women of color versus upper-middle-class white women. She responded that in all cases, she tried to validate the woman's experience. She tried to provide a sense of safety, to help the woman discover her own fears o that she could be present emotionally for her child. She listened. This is a form of love- a space between people, for confessions and hopes and flaws, and for the seed of solidarity to germinate.

There is one circumstance in which the extremity of do-gooders looks normal, and that is war. In wartime — or in a crisis so devastating that it resembles war, such as an earthquake or a hurricane — duty expands far beyond its peacetime boundaries ... In war, what in ordinary times would be thought weirdly zealous becomes expected ... People respond to this new moral regime in different ways: some suffer under the tension of moral extremity and long for the forgiving looseness of ordinary life; others feel it was the time when they were most vividly alive, in comparison with which the rest of life seems dull and lacking in purpose... in wartime, duty takes on the glamour of freedom, because duty becomes more exciting than ordinary liberty. This is the difference between do-gooders and ordinary people: for do-gooders, it is always wartime. They always feel themselves responsible for strangers — they always feel that strangers, like compatriots in war, are their own people. They know that there are always those as urgently in need as the victims of battle, and they consider themselves conscripted by duty.

Do countries require a crisis to motivate them to act, or do nations ever act in anticipation of problems? The crises discussed in this book illustrate both types of responses to this frequently asked question. Meiji Japan avoided dealing with the growing danger from the West, until forced into responding to Perry’s visit. From the Meiji Restoration of 1868 onwards, however, Japan did not require any further external shocks to motivate it to embark on its crash program of change: Japan instead changed in anticipation of the risk of further pressure from the West. Similarly, Finland ignored Soviet concerns until it was forced to pay attention by the Soviet attack of 1939. But from 1944 onwards, the Finns did not require any further Soviet attacks to galvanize them: instead, their foreign policy aimed at constantly anticipating and forestalling Soviet pressure. In Chile, Allende’s policies were in response to Chile’s chronic polarization, and not in response to a sudden crisis, so Allende was anticipating future problems as well as addressing current ones. In contrast, the Chilean military launched their coup in response to what

The remaking of the self that mothers experience- the struggles of overcoming bordeom, fatigue, irritation; of being persistently present; of trying to survive a love that can feel like an ocean one can't swim- is not of great concern to a world focused on having. So many fall back on a system of rewards, products, and achievements that fits into the framework of success in which they've operated for most of their lives: this is the "Mommy Olympics," as de Marneffe calls it. Or they can resort to cliches, which mask the complexities of individual experience and squash it into a quote to be hung above the dining room table or posted on Facebook. There is no way to articulate and venerate being in a society so focused on having. One of the ways, which we have mostly lost, would be ritual. In a void where few rituals, stories, and symbols are available to mothers, women have responded by conjuring a shadow universe of fear and darkness and loss. The immense passion and confusing energy that motherhood generates gets channeled into a never-ending series of disaster scenarios necessitating vigilant prevention. The wide-open and terrifying potential for being narrows into a relentless pursuit of security.

It seems that the first obligation mothering places upon a woman,' writes psychoanalyst Jana Malamud Smith, 'is the demand not just that she attempt to keep the child alive, but that she accept the fact of living closely with death.' American mothers tend to respond to this inherent fact by going into overdrive on the American belief that death can be fought with righteous fervor: with organics, sustainably made wooden blocks painted with non-toxic vegetable dyes, a 4-1 preschool teacher ration, bathtub spout covers. What is lost, thinking always of risk, aiming always for zero risk, is not measurable. There are no statistics, no charts, no metrics. There is a gecko in a cage with a heat lamp for a sun. There is a dog who has never been let off leash. There is no rain in the mouth. There is no solitude, no wandering to the edge of the woods at dusk. There is no unwashed fruit eaten with dirty hands. There is no mess. There is no staking of oneself, one's small life, against the hugeness of the world. There is no sharing a meal with a stranger. Jane Hirshfield wrote, 'As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty/ We become our choices.' The greatest deception of the obsessive pursuit of zero risk is that we have no choice. We choose, often under immense pressure. And when we choose imagined safety every single time, we gradually give up what makes life worth living.

Which is actually good because we’re doing an AP Euro study group this week at the library—I mean good that it got canceled, not good that someone died—so I was wondering too if maybe I can use the car, so you won’t have to come pick me up super late every night?” Alma had been a wildly clingy kid, but now she is a mostly autonomous and wholly inscrutable seventeen-year-old; she is mean and gorgeous and breathtakingly good at math; she has inside jokes with her friends about inexplicable things like Gary Shandling and avocado toast, paints microscopic cherries on her fingernails and endeavors highly involved baking ventures, filling their fridge with oblong bagels and six-layer cakes. “I’m asking now because last time you told me I didn’t give you enough notice,” she says. She has recently begun speaking conversationally to Julia and Mark again after nearly two years of brooding silence, and now it’s near impossible to get her to stop. She regales them with breathless incomprehensible stories at the dinner table; she delivers lengthy recaps of midseason episodes of television shows they have never seen; she mounts elaborate and convincing defenses of things she wants them to give her, or give her permission to do. Conversing with her is a mechanical act requiring the constant ability to shift gears, to backpedal or follow inane segues or catapult from the real world to a fictional one without stopping to refuel. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that she won’t be accepted next month to several of the seventeen exalted and appallingly expensive colleges to which she has applied, and because Julia would like the remainder of her tenure at home to elapse free of trauma, she responds to her daughter as she did when she was a napping baby, tiptoeing around her to avoid awakening unrest. The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.

Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.

Now, with all seven of these chakras revolving in the right direction with no blockages whatsoever, your kundalini would not be able to help itself from rising into that state of bliss, which it perceives above. Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.

A few years back, I had a long session with a psychiatrist who was conducting a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on reporters working in war zones. At one point, he asked me: “How many bodies have you seen in your lifetime?” Without thinking for too long, I replied: “I’m not sure exactly. I've seen quite a few mass graves in Africa and Bosnia, and I saw a well crammed full of corpses in East Timor, oh and then there was Rwanda and Goma...” After a short pause, he said to me calmly: “Do you think that's a normal response to that question?” He was right. It wasn't a normal response. Over the course of their lifetime, most people see the bodies of their parents, maybe their grandparents at a push. Nobody else would have responded to that question like I did. Apart from my fellow war reporters, of course. When I met Marco Lupis nearly twenty years ago, in September 1999, we were stood watching (fighting the natural urge to divert our gaze) as pale, maggot-ridden corpses, decomposed beyond recognition, were being dragged out of the well in East Timor. Naked bodies shorn of all dignity. When Marco wrote to ask me to write the foreword to this book and relive the experiences we shared together in Dili, I agreed without giving it a second thought because I understood that he too was struggling for normal responses. That he was hoping he would find some by writing this book. While reading it, I could see that Marco shares my obsession with understanding the world, my compulsion to recount the horrors I have seen and witnessed, and my need to overcome them and leave them behind. He wants to bring sense to the apparently senseless. Books like this are important. Books written by people who have done jobs like ours. It's not just about conveying - be it in the papers, on TV or on the radio - the atrocities committed by the very worst of humankind as they are happening; it’s about ensuring these atrocities are never forgotten. Because all too often, unforgivably, the people responsible go unpunished. And the thing they rely on most for their impunity is that, with the passing of time, people simply forget. There is a steady flow of information as we are bombarded every day with news of the latest massacre, terrorist attack or humanitarian crisis. The things that moved or outraged us yesterday are soon forgotten, washed away by today's tidal wave of fresh events. Instead they become a part of history, and as such should not be forgotten so quickly. When I read Marco's book, I discovered that the people who murdered our colleague Sander Thoenes in Dili, while he was simply doing his job like the rest of us, are still at large to this day. I read the thoughts and hopes of Ingrid Betancourt just twenty-four hours before she was abducted and taken to the depths of the Colombian jungle, where she would remain captive for six long years. I read that we know little or nothing about those responsible for the Cambodian genocide, whose millions of victims remain to this day without peace or justice. I learned these things because the written word cannot be destroyed. A written account of abuse, terror, violence or murder can be used to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice, even though this can be an extremely drawn-out process during and after times of war. It still torments me, for example, that so many Bosnian women who were raped have never got justice and every day face the prospect of their assailants passing them on the street. But if I follow in Marco's footsteps and write down the things I have witnessed in a book, people will no longer be able to plead ignorance. That is why we need books like this one.

If I were to ask you about let’s say coaching a high school football team for your local high school and told you the only time you were needed to be there as coach, was on game day. That is right no practice during the week, just take the team and win is all we ask. How do I prepare them if I cannot practice you ask? Well sir they have been trained and practiced in their freshman, sophomore and junior years. You will be the varsity coach and the team knows the game and how it’s played, all you need to do is set up the game plan on game day and organize your team so they win! Ludicrous! How can I be expected to develop the cohesion necessary to put a winning team on the field, without practice, despite their prior training and the three-plus years’ experience? Yes it is ludicrous. Yet this is exactly what we expect of law enforcement, security personnel and other first responders tasked with responding to and winning in crisis situations.

The preparation the wise made was in studying the character of Christ. This was the focus of the classroom sessions. Character is made up of thoughts and feelings. Therefore, to obtain the character of Christ is to obtain His thoughts and His feelings. By meditating upon Christ’s life, His character (thoughts and feelings), and by beholding those thoughts and feelings, a mind transplant occurred where the wise, over time, assimilated Christ’s character. So when the crisis came, when the time of trouble hit, the wise were able to respond with Christ’s thoughts and His feelings and not their own. Just as Christ was calm and dignified when His captors took Him from Gethsemane, so the wise will reflect his peace in the storm. It is in this way that we receive the “mind of Christ” (see Philippians 2:5), thus, becoming wise and having the thought reflexes of Christ.

Our world today is characterized with a process of globalization, multiculturalism, with clashes of civilizations, gradual isolation of the individual in spite of increased communication, inequality in prosperity, and fundamentalism, with the meaninglessness threat of terrorism, indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources and totalitarism. The prevalent trend is towards crisis intervention rather than crisis prevention, responding to crises caused by natural disasters, wars, economic grid and so on.

The former president is said to have asked Kennedy why air cover had been withdrawn, and Kennedy responded by expressing fear that the Soviets would “make trouble”[45] in Berlin. Eisenhower countered, “That is exactly the opposite of what would really happen.”[46] Eisenhower also prophetically told the president that "the failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something that they would otherwise not do." Sure enough, the Soviets quickly formed the opinion that Kennedy was "too young, intellectual, not prepared well for decision making in crisis situations ... too intelligent and too weak." Kennedy's ability to conduct American foreign policy was understandably in question, and it would be eagerly put to the test by Khrushchev. Moreover, Fidel Castro remained

The personality, in effect, is made up of one’s coping repertoire and ability to adapt and therefore creates immunity to invading stressors or, in keeping with the analogy, bacteria. Throughout development, one faces crises and challenges. As development occurs, the system learns to respond, shift, adapt, and cope. However, if the system is overwhelmed by stressors insurmountable to the existing coping system, the system cannot effectively manage.

Indeed, the consensual nature of the EU itself has meant that EU-level institutions are far weaker than certain federal institutions in the United States. These weaknesses were made painfully evident in the European debt crisis of 2010–2013. The United States Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Congress responded quite forcefully to its financial crisis, with a massive expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, the $700 billion TARP, a second $700 billion stimulus package in 2009, and continuing asset purchases by the Fed under successive versions of quantitative easing. Under emergency circumstances, the executive branch was able to browbeat the Congress into supporting its initiatives. The European Union, by contrast, has taken a much more hesitant and piecemeal approach to the euro crisis. Lacking a monetary authority with the same powers as the Federal Reserve, and with fiscal policy remaining the preserve of national-level governments, European policy makers have had fewer tools than their American counterparts to deal with economic shocks.

APRIL 22 Moses responded to the people, “Don’t be afraid, for God has come to test you, so that you will fear Him and will not sin.” Exodus 20:20 I have wrestled with a stronghold of fear much of my life. Like you, the combination of life’s challenges and a long list of loved ones provide the enemy no few opportunities to prey on my fears. I have often heard the statistic that 90 percent of what we fear never comes to pass. Those statistics have certainly proved true in my experience, but God has taught me as much from the 10 percent as the 90. In fact, one of the ways God has cured my fears is by allowing a few of them to come to fruition. After the crisis came and went, He seemed to ask, “Beth, did you live through it?

if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when elite interests are in peril.

In response to current events, people often reach for historical analogies, and this occasion was no exception. The trick is to choose the right analogy. In August 2007, the analogies that came to mind—both inside and outside the Fed—were October 1987, when the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted nearly 23 percent in a single day, and August 1998, when the Dow had fallen 11.5 percent over three days after Russia defaulted on its foreign debts. With help from the Fed, markets had rebounded each time with little evident damage to the economy. Not everyone viewed these interventions as successful, though. In fact, some viewed the Fed’s actions in the fall of 1998—three quarter-point reductions in the federal funds rate—as an overreaction that helped fuel the growing dot-com bubble. Others derided what they perceived to be a tendency of the Fed to respond too strongly to price declines in stocks and other financial assets, which they dubbed the “Greenspan put.” (A put is an options contract that protects the buyer against loss if the price of a stock or other security declines.) Newspaper opinion columns in August 2007 were rife with speculation that Helicopter Ben would provide a similar put soon. In arguing against Fed intervention, many commentators asserted that investors had grown complacent and needed to be taught a lesson. The cure to the current mess, this line of thinking went, was a repricing of risk, meaning a painful reduction in asset prices—from stocks to bonds to mortgage-linked securities. “Credit panics are never pretty, but their virtue is that they restore some fear and humility to the marketplace,” the Wall Street Journal had editorialized, in arguing for no rate cut at the August 7 FOMC meeting.

September 11 MISSIONARY WEAPONS “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” John 13:14     Ministering in Everyday Opportunities. Ministering in everyday opportunities that surround us does not mean that we select our own surroundings—it means being God’s very special choice to be available for use in any of the seemingly random surroundings which He has engineered for us. The very character we exhibit in our present surroundings is an indication of what we will be like in other surroundings.     The things Jesus did were the most menial of everyday tasks, and this is an indication that it takes all of God’s power in me to accomplish even the most common tasks in His way. Can I use a towel as He did? Towels, dishes, sandals, and all the other ordinary things in our lives reveal what we are made of more quickly than anything else. It takes God Almighty Incarnate in us to do the most menial duty as it ought to be done.     Jesus said, “I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you” (13:15). Notice the kind of people that God brings around you, and you will be humiliated once you realize that this is actually His way of revealing to you the kind of person you have been to Him. Now He says we should exhibit to those around us exactly what He has exhibited to us.     Do you find yourself responding by saying, “Oh, I will do all that once I’m out on the mission field”? Talking in this way is like trying to produce the weapons of war while in the trenches of the battlefield—you will be killed while trying to do it.     We have to go the “second mile” with God (see Matthew 5:41). Yet some of us become worn out in the first ten steps. Then we say, “Well, I’ll just wait until I get closer to the next big crisis in my life.” But if we do not steadily minister in everyday opportunities, we will do nothing when the crisis comes.

Several forms of thinking play a crucial role in preparing and readying us for conflict, violence or crisis.  These include the “if – then or when-then thinking; when X happens, then I will do… Y”. Positive self-talk and visualizing the situation are positive tools that develop patterns in your mind (like any other form of training) in an effort to anticipate threats as we explore the situation, make an situational assessment and plan  an adaptable response to a predator we can’t fully anticipate. We need to become students of human behavior, both normal and aberrant, to rapidly recognize the difference between the two and be ready to instantly respond correctly and accurately.  Inherent in this understands the various dimensions of aberrant behavior between deviant, dangerous, suspicious, under the influence, and psychiatric.

As cops we often cry loudly about the lack of training in our profession (I am guilty of it myself). However while we complain and whine about the seemingly lack of interest in ongoing training we also miss the opportunities to train and learn from the everyday lessons available to us. Those lessons that come from every call we respond to and every shift we work. The uses of training tools such as; tactical decision games and after action reviews still are rare occurrences in our profession and seemingly only used when some catastrophic or unconventional crisis has occurred i.e. a cop killed in the line of duty or a deadly force scenario that leaves the public calling for an explanation. We should be doing more to harness the wisdom of the street cop and what he learns from each and every day on each and every shift. The shift debriefing is a training tool we can and should utilize to develop full spectrum cops capable of making sound decisions and employing sound tactics to resolve crisis situations and record and report them accurately in the aftermath.

Systemic threats are notoriously hard to anticipate. If bubbles were easy to identify, for example, far fewer investors would get swept into them in the first place. But I was convinced that changing our approach would give us a better chance for success. In particular, I urged Nellie and her staff not only to think through what they saw as the most likely outcomes but also to consider worst-case scenarios. I had come to believe that, during the housing boom, the FOMC had spent too much time debating whether rising house prices reflected a bubble and too little time thinking about the consequences, if a bubble did exist, of its bursting spectacularly. More attention to the worst-case scenario might have left us better prepared to respond to what actually happened.

Finally, policymakers had to weigh what might happen if Greece, after a default, also abandoned the euro and returned to its own currency. One reason to do so would be to regain monetary policy independence, which might help the Greek government respond to the economic crash that was likely to follow a default. But if Greece left the euro, fears that other countries might follow would no doubt increase. Even the possibility that the eurozone might break apart would inflict damage. For example, bank depositors in a country thought to be at risk of leaving the euro would worry that their euro-denominated deposits might be forcibly converted to the new, and presumably less valuable, national currency. To avoid that risk, depositors might withdraw their euros from their own country’s banks in favor of, say, German banks (which, in an era of cross-border branching, might simply mean walking a block down the street or clicking on a bank’s website). These withdrawals could quickly degenerate into a full-fledged run on the suspect country’s banks. For these reasons, finance ministers and especially central bank governors in Europe generally, if grudgingly, concluded that they would have to assist Greece. ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet, who had decried the Lehman failure, was particularly adamant on this point and sought to persuade other European policymakers.

Acting like a man means developing a non-anxious presence that sees the big picture, remains calm in a crisis, and won’t cave in under pressure. Godly men respond; they don’t react.

Yet it is intrinsic to oligarchy that oligarchs are a small minority, a point graphically made in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ slogan of ‘We are the 99 per cent’. But it is easier to identify what the 99 per cent are against than what they are for, an incoherence typical of the swell of unfocused public anger that followed the global financial crisis: anger with the finance industry and with the political failure to anticipate the crisis or respond effectively to it. Most countries ejected the governments—whether left or right—that had held office during the crisis. But that made no material difference to public policy towards the finance sector. In the absence of any intellectual framework for such policy beyond a call for ‘more regulation’, how could it? Perhaps

BEHIND THE WALL The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, twenty-five years ago this month, but the first attempts to breach it came immediately after it went up, just past midnight on August 13, 1961. The East German regime had been secretly stockpiling barbed wire and wooden sawhorses, which the police, who learned of their mission only that night, hastily assembled into a barrier. For many Berliners, the first sign that a historic turn had been taken was when the U-Bahn, the city’s subway, stopped running on certain routes, leaving late-night passengers to walk home through streets that were suddenly filled with soldiers. As realization set in, so did a sense of panic. By noon the next day, as Ann Tusa recounts in “The Last Division,” people were trying to pull down the barbed wire with their hands. Some succeeded, in scattered places, and a car drove through a section of the Wall to the other side. In the following weeks, the authorities began reinforcing it. Within a year, the Wall was nearly eight feet high, with patrols and the beginnings of a no man’s land. But it still wasn’t too tall for a person to scale, and on August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, who was eighteen years old, and his friend Helmut Kulbeik decided to try. They picked a spot on Zimmerstrasse, near the American Checkpoint Charlie, and just after two o’clock in the afternoon they made a run for it. Kulbeik got over, but Fechter was shot by a guard, and fell to the ground. He was easily visible from the West; there are photographs of him, taken as he lay calling for help. Hundreds of people gathered on the Western side, shouting for someone to save him. The East German police didn’t want to, and the Americans had been told that if they crossed the border they might start a war. Someone tossed a first-aid kit over the Wall, but Fechter was too weak to pick it up. After an hour, he bled to death. Riots broke out in West Berlin, and many asked angrily why the Americans had let Fechter die. He was hardly more than a child, and he wanted to be a free man. It’s a fair question, though one can imagine actions taken that day which could have led to a broader confrontation. It was not a moment to risk grand gestures; Fechter died two months before the Cuban missile crisis. (When the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy told his aides that it was “not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) And there was something off key about Germans, so soon after the end of the Second World War, railing about others being craven bystanders. Some observers came to see the Wall as the necessary scaffolding on which to secure a postwar peace. That’s easy to say, though, when one is on the side with the department stores, and without the secret police. Technically, West Berlin was the city being walled in, a quasi-metropolis detached from the rest of West Germany. The Allied victors—America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had divided Germany into four parts, and, since Berlin was in the Soviet sector, they divided the city into four parts, too. In 1948, the Soviets cut off most road and rail access to the city’s three western sectors, in an effort to assert their authority. The Americans responded with the Berlin Airlift, sending in planes carrying food and coal, and so much salt that their engines began to corrode. By the time the Wall went up, it wasn’t the West Berliners who were hungry. West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, was under way, while life in the East involved interminable shortages. West Berliners were surrounded by Soviet military encampments, but they were free and they could leave—and so could anyone who could get to their part of the city. The East Berliners were the prisoners. In the weeks before the Wall went up, more than a thousand managed to cross the border each day; the Wall was built to keep them from leaving. But people never stopped trying to tear it down.

Most important, though, was the way this string of bailouts fit the government pattern: prevent the economy from correcting itself. Once again, rather than let an inefficient allocation of resources shake itself out, politicians and central bankers decided that the right cure for a drinking binge was “the hair of the dog that bit you.” That is, when confronted with a crisis caused by government-created moral hazard, cheap money, and central planning, Washington responded with more moral hazard, even cheaper money, and heightened central planning.

Joanna didn’t like Federer and, by extension, she didn’t like his client, either. Lucinda Mappin, faced with the tragedy of her daughter’s murder, was responding to the crisis in her life with considerable dignity and grace. Dealing with a similarly tragic loss, Alfred and Martha Beasley’s bickering daughters came up short. Behaving like aging spoiled brats and caught up in their own selfishness, all they were capable of was broadcasting their decades-old feud far and wide. Joanna sat at her desk for a few moments, contemplating the vast difference. I think Alfred and Martha deserve better, she told herself finally.

The global refugee crisis is indeed global. It isn’t a question of whether we should respond here (in the West) or there (at the crises’ points of origin), nor if we should address immediate needs or root causes. We can and must do all of the above.

there are some people who always seem to come up with a plan, to find a way to respond to the crisis. They don’t always make the best decisions, but their logic usually leads them down a reasonable path. And sometimes they come up with ideas that are brilliant.

Confidence spark To keep poised in the face of a challenge, give yourself time to explore your reaction to the situation and what choices you have moving forward. If you are not in touch with your feelings about what is happening, you are less likely to act in your best interest or in the best interests of the others involved. Take a moment to pinpoint your emotions, thoughts, and beliefs about the crisis. Then make a list of strategic actions you can take and the results you think they may yield—including how the people affected might respond.

There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.

Asch también descubrió que bastaba con que una sola persona se atreviera a expresar su opinión y diera la respuesta correcta ante el sujeto del experimento para que este se sintiera liberado para responder correctamente también. El desacuerdo hace que la mente se libere del miedo.

Muchos estadounidenses (hombres y mujeres) consideran que las represalias son un signo de hombría: un hombre de verdad (o una mujer fuerte) devuelve el golpe cuando le hacen daño a él o a los suyos. No todas las culturas han pensado así. Los griegos y los romanos antiguos creían que la ira era un síntoma de debilidad y, por consiguiente, una reacción infantil o, incluso, “mujeril”, pues consideraban que las mujeres eran criaturas débiles. La verdadera fortaleza, pensaban, está en no dejarse arrastrar por el juego de responder a la “sangre con sangre”. En la mitología antigua, el castigo vengativo es malo, como bien ilustró el trágico griego Esquilo al caracterizar a las furias, diosas de la venganza, como unas bestias sucias y venenosas para la política por su incapacidad para pensar en el bienestar humano.

At the same time, you’ll become known as someone who responds promptly to email, so more people will consider it worth their while to message you to begin with. (By contrast, negligent emailers frequently find that forgetting to reply ends up saving them time: people find alternative solutions to the problems they were nagging you to solve, or the looming crisis they were emailing about never materializes.) So it’s not simply that you never get through your email; it’s that the process of “getting through your email” actually generates more email. The general principle in operation is one you might call the “efficiency trap.” Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time,” because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.

Cohen didn’t know how to respond, other than to excuse himself as quickly as possible.

The system hasn’t kept pace with financial innovation and needs to be fixed so that we have the capacity and the authority to respond to constantly evolving global capital markets.

to respond flexibly to economic developments without the constraint of an announced target.

It operated by responding to complaints and did not conduct regular examinations.