Moving on and forgetting will not help. We need to deal with our inner fear to help us combat terror! despite the reported spontaneous ire of people against the government, showed a decidedly lower level of interest and response than earlier similar attacks. Newspapers reported life back to normal faster and the ever “resilient” people of PKRi went back to their daily lives almost unnaturally fast. Once again world media marveled at “the considerable, continued restraint” exercised by PKR after the attacks.
The ISA, which was intended to be used against the communist terrorists, was often used by BN to arrest anyone who is effective or influential enough to cause massive vote swing against the government. Looks like the sedition act is now being be used for the same purpose.Absolutely. For the police to continue using the Sedition Act against protesters on a 'selective' basis is repugnant in itself, but to use it after the govt has announced that the Act will be repealed is sheer inconsistency, a gross 'miscarriage of justice'.
PDRM uses the Sedition Act as a catch-all for opposition politicians and govt critics. It is never used against Umno and their lackeys like Perkasa.Continued abuse by the BN regime of obsolete legal statues .Misuse of state institutions such as the AG and the PDRM to creat fear and oppress the people overzealous enthusiasm to please its lord and master is very obvious!
See the difference - the role of the Police in a communist or dictatorship country vs in a democratic country. In the former, the police is a tool of the govt in power while in the latter, the police is not but is impartial and .... What is the logic then. When the ruling party looses an election, we get a new police force or sack all the top cops! did you ever reprimand your supporters when they show disrespect in burning Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng's (LGE) picture in Penang and did butt exercise in front of Ambiga's house? How come the PDRM never investigate and charged anyone then? If you did then i am sure you & your wife's pictures would not had been stepped on. Did you show leadership by example ? Now, siapa kurang ajar first?PM is a flip flop artist. What do you expect.Interest and chagrin beyond the city also had a blunted edge and was diluted enough to peter out soon. People spoke of apathy towards victims and opined that Mumbaikars have now learnt to walk with terror. Groups of onlookers were noticed standing by and shooting pictures and video footage on cellphones rather than lending a helping hand as others removed corpses and the injured from disaster struck areas.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Somehow it seems impossible that anyone can get used to terror and start living with it as an unassailable reality of daily life. Cowed down by it, yes. Angry, aggressive, frustrated, helpless, yes. But it would be a sad state of affairs indeed if people became indifferent to terror attacks or unsympathetic to victims.
If a Canadian cop’s misguided statement can unleash a series of ‘Slut Walks” across the globe, are the lives of Mumbaikars so cheap that they keep getting blasted in terror attacks (the fourth in the city since 2003) and the world sees no need to take concerted action beyond a few words of sympathy and some suspect praise for PM Manmohan Singh for his “continued restraint”?
If not, then why do we see the fear element associated with terror getting diluted? Why are Mumbaikars stepping out into a city under siege as easily as if stepping onto a flight and carrying on with life as if nothing untoward ever happened?
The terrorist attacks have happened way too often and when we saw the hitherto unassailable US brought to its knees by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre twin towers, our belief in the all-pervasive, insidious and unassailable power of sudden terror attacks took deeper roots.
And it is this feeling of helplessness that manifests as apathy or resilience. When you cannot do anything against a situation, just bow your head, pull down your hat, and trudge on. A dangerous but naturally adaptive response. Even as the heart trembles with fear and the eyes glaze over with helplessness, the expressed response seems to be one of aloofness and apathy! It is an almost ostrich-like response believing that if you bury your head in the sand and close your eyes, danger will pass you by.
Psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr Deepak Raheja explains the phenomenon as Reaction Formation, “This is a state of affairs where the expressed emotion is exactly the opposite of the actual emotion. This is a dichotomy of the mind, an ambivalence where you do not wish to be part of a situation and yet feel highly vulnerable. It is like you have accepted the attacks as a reality you have to live with and are helpless against. The more you think about the situation, the more it highlights your own vulnerability and helplessness; hence you bury it deep within your mind and decide to move on. “
And so it sickens me to the pit of my stomach when I hear people praising the resilience and never-say-die spirit of Mumbaikars. “Resilience indeed,” says a colleague from Mumbai sarcastically. “What can we do? We are all scared to the core of our being. But we have to earn a living and beat the fear enough to be able to carry on with our daily lives!”
Another friend from Mumbai had visited Zaveri Bazar just the day before the blast. In a voice still trembling with fear, she says, “I could have been blasted into bits had I just decided to postpone my shopping by one day! I shudder to imagine what would have happened to my family!”
Regular train commuters are on high alert and report excessive police presence at stations. “But for how long?” questions a regular. “We will all go through the motions for the next few days and then life will get back to normal and we will teach ourselves to forget! And then just as we are about to heave a sigh of relief, another attack shatters the peace of the city and our minds!
“On the one hand we are all taught to think only positive things and create positive vibes around us to attract positivity. And then there are these hugely negative incidents. It is better to forget and move on!”
However Dr Raheja warns this can be dangerous. Explains the doctor. “You have buried an emotion without dealing with it. And if the fear that is still present at the loci is not addressed, it will prey on your mind and it is then that the Law of Attraction may work against you. It is better to deal with it by expressing your sympathy publicly, either through sms or a candlelight march or just by talking about it.”
Closing your eyes with a fervent prayer because you were spared this time will not help. We all need to raise our voices against terror. Forget Slut Walks; it is the spectre of terror that needs to be dealt with globally. If the government cannot work up the will to ensure good intelligence, state-of-the-art surveillance systems and quick, concerted anti-terrorism action, then it is high time citizens took up the responsibility of protecting themselves – not just for a few days after each attack, but as a sustained, ongoing process!
A typical worrier will fret about a situation, think about all possible negative aspects and try to circumvent them before they become a reality. So a worrying mother will think of all possible evils that could befall her child, be it kidnapping, rape, an accident or a fight. Then she will try to circumvent the disasters even before they are a remote possibility. Another person may worry about not having adequate domestic help, and in the next instant start worrying about the possibility of getting in a criminal as a cook or driver!
So, if a worrier cannot stop worrying, let’s see how he can worry better, more effectively! It would help if a worrier identified and focused on those worries that can be dealt with. For instance, “Will I reach office on time?” is a more welcome worry than, “Will I be chucked out of my job someday soon?” You can do something about the first, but nothing about the latter. Second, we tend to worry a lot about the whys and wherefores. It would be helpful to just accept that there are many things in life we will never understand, so just accept them. Is God punishing you because you did something wrong? Are you likely to die of cancer? Will you outlive your spouse? All these are useless worries. So just focus on worries you can act upon! It may help to set aside a time, maybe half an hour every day, for worrying and even writing down your worries, suggest experts. This gives you an idea of how many things you worry about and enable you to sift between the valid worries and the useless ones. This would also give the worrier a sense of control over his worries, which he lacks otherwise.
A worrier actually feels better after having worried, so this experiment would help him achieve his catharsis and so hopefully be free of worries for rest of the day! In the movie, Inception, Leonardo di Caprio rightly praises the power of negative emotions. He says while planning the ‘dream’ heist, “Positive emotion comes from negative emotion all the time. We are all looking for reconciliation and catharsis…” In some ways, the worrier is better off than someone who doesn’t invest enough thought into every aspect of life. The happy-go-lucky non-worrier puts too much faith in Destiny, life and people. This may prevent him from taking adequate precautions, and so actually be more likely to get into trouble than the chronic worrier. So a little worrying is a good thing. However, a person who worries too much will not just drive himself to illness, but also be a source of constant irritation and depression to those around! So let’s all put on our worrying caps – for part of the day at least!
To score in any test or to be called ‘one of the crowd’ is anathema to our very being. Nobody wants to be an “also was…” and most of our struggles are directed towards proving how different we are from ‘others’. The internet is inundated with bloggers expressing this fear; everyone wants to be extraordinary, nobody wants to live an ordinary life and die unsung.
One blogger says he doesn’t want to “blend into the crowd, not be a person people meet and immediately forget”…. Another puts it more graphically, “Living the average life everyone else does – ****ing the same girl for the rest of your life, having kids, getting married, 9-5 job, sitting at home in front of the TV, getting fat, doing the same **** week in -week out. Are you OK with slipping into that category and settling with it?” And yet how different can one be? As my son asked a couple of days ago, “Mom, why is everybody’s life the same? We are all born, learn to talk/walk, go to school, college, get a job, raise a family, and then die….?”
My first instinct was to give him the spiel of those who leave ‘footprints on the sands of time,’ but then I never really have understood how it would help a person to be remembered after he is dead and gone!? And if you believe in reincarnation, can you not visualize a scenario where a great historical figure is reborn as an “average” man and forced to read up about himself and memorise the dates he made noteworthy in his past birth! What irony, and one he wouldn’t even be aware of! What price then his having been “above average” or “different”? And so, instead, I spoke to my son about the need to make a difference, not because one would be remembered for it, but because it gives one immense satisfaction to have lived a life that is worthwhile, one which would help us reach the higher echelons of spirituality. How different would the history of the Ambanis and perhaps that of the Indian industrial scene have been had Dhirubhai not chosen to follow his dream and take it up as a mission! As the Ambani brothers said at their recent reunion at Chorwad on Dhirubhai’s 80th birth anniversary, the biggest lesson they learnt from their father was that if you take up some work, take it up with a mission and don’t leave it half way! ”The struggle should not be to crawl up to a position that is above average, but to do the best one can by oneself and by others. The fight is not to leave others behind, but to achieve one’s own full potential.
The crime is not being perceived as below average or just average, but to know that you are capable of much more and yet not reaching out for it! After all what meaning does below or above average hold if the ‘average’ was to be pulled up several notches? What happens if ALL are extraordinary? Then the average person becomes extraordinary, and wouldn’t that be your goal too? Strive for the extraordinary within yourself and if you achieve that, you would automatically be far above average — an extraordinary human being, without even having thought about it!
Consider this gem I stumbled upon — “When I walk through what scares me, I am walking through what is stopping me from getting or going where I want to be…” When I asked my facebook friends their worst fears, here is what they confessed to fearing most — mediocrity, complacency, not being able to break one’s comfort zone, not making a name before dying, not meeting expectations, failure or ignominy. Says one, “There is nothing attractive or desirable about being average..” Another agrees, “Being mediocre is so bland and so average. ”Most of the time what holds us down is being caught up so badly in our fears that we refuse to step outside our comfort zone and actually get down to the task of living life as it is meant to be lived! The pragmatic and wildly popular American singer-musician-actor Taylor Swift said, “I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.” I would say that the problem is not the fear, because the fear is what helps you push yourself to standing full stature. The problem is the intimidation — being so bogged down by that fear that you do nothing about it!
How Viral Fear© Affects You Everyday.The article below appeared inOpedNews.com and AmericanThinker.com VIRAL FEAR© AND THE STATE OF NATIONAL INSECURITY© 2006, Judith Acosta |
Lately, when I watch the news from Capitol Hill, I am more and more often reminded of a Star Trek episode entitled “Spock’s Brain.” In it the prerequisite nubile alien female humanoids steal Spock’s gray matter in order to save their fully automated planet. We are led to deduce that they need his brain because they don’t have brains of their own. Of course, Captain Kirk can’t let his first officer wander about witless and he leans on the aliens to release the captive, throbbing brain. After 40 minutes of back and forth, one of the alien women stamps her foot and whines, “BRAIN, BRAIN, WHAT IS BRAIN?!”
There is so little thoughtfulness on television now that when I see an interview conducted with genuine respect, time and interest in the subject matter, I am moved to tears and renewed with hope. But these Maxwell House moments are few and far between. For the most part, fear is both the medium and the message. Everything is sold by it and through it: politics, strategies, cars, insurance, medicine, homes, magazines, food, toilet tissue. It has seeped into our cells the way pollutants drip slowly and invisibly into our aquifers. You can’t always see it, you can’t always taste it, and you can’t clearly point to it. But its presence and its subtle effects are there nevertheless.
I have been working with fear and fearful people for twenty years. I was (and can still occasionally be) a fearful person. I have watched it, felt it, wrote about it, and helped heal people from it. As a result, I’ve learned a few things about fear, particularly that modern societal contagion I call viral fear.READMOREhttp://maztulisstrategicmanagement.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/88/
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