Do you ever feel like you’re living in a science fiction movie? What narratives do you think of when you read the following headlines?
UNDERGROUND SHELTERS BACK IN VOGUE
CORPSES IN NEW YORK SUBWAYS
WHAT TO DO IF NORTH KOREA DROPS A NUCLEAR BOMB
(Don’t hide under your desk!)
CANNIBALS ON THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE
(Okay, I made that one up.)
Weird news is not new but the new weirdness can’t help but make us feel uncomfortable. Who thought we would be living under a genuine threat of nuclear conflict in our lifetime?
In Chapter Four, I reported with “hindsight humor” about the duck-and-cover drills we held in public school and what now looks like hypervigilance after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
With a foreign country threatening to send ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads headed our way, each of us can choose to hide from our own fear or find ways to stay steady—or relatively steady—with whatever comes.
“Only a Matter of Time”
There must be millions of American mothers like me who held our babies in our arms for the first time and never thought we would have a heart-to-heart talk with him or her about the pros and cons of iodine tablets for protection against radiation. Nor have I ever met a mother who pictured her newborn in a gas mask. It’s a surreal, macabre image. But in a country like Israel, where the twin realities of terrorism and war are facts of life, a newborn—boy or girl—will become a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces.
“Israel is a society that lives on its sword. We cannot survive unless we are skillful with it,” says Dr. Omri Merose, an orthopedic surgeon in Tel Aviv.
Since its birth as a nation in 1948, the state of Israel has been involved in ten official wars and innumerable acts of armed conflict and encounters with terrorists.
“The next conflict is only a matter of time,” Dr. Merose says. “Living with it in real time, all the time, and growing up with it, you have a different mindset. For us, living between conflicts and expecting the next conflict is clear.”
It’s a pragmatic mindset.
“We focus on what’s good and keep optimistic on certain aspects of life,” he says. “Because we are used to very intensive reality with a lot of unfortunate events happening all the time, we probably react with less panic.”
Nor does he believe it is reasonable to expect people in the United States to think like Israelis. Considering how we Americans panic when our president tweets, I asked him what we will do when something real happens.
“There is no real threat to the existence of the United States of America,” he said, “but we live with that threat all the time.”
Even though the threat to survival is greater in Israel, the rate of PTSD among Israeli adults is slightly higher than nine percent, compared to eight percent of US adults suffering from PTSD.47
A significantly higher percentage of PTSD is reported in the Gaza Strip, where nearly 18 percent of adults surveyed reported lifetime PTSD. Chronic PTSD is prevalent among some 35 percent of Palestinian adolescents living on the West Bank and East Jerusalem.48
Living with the awareness that, at any moment, life can be shattered by a suicide bomber comes with a price.
“We are the first ones to know that aggression brings more aggression. Our society experiences fear and anxiety on a very high scale. Many people have PTSD,” Dr. Merose says.
Emergency medical treatment after a terrorist attack includes psychological first aid. The surgeon attributes strong family bonds and shared commitment to the nation’s survival as strong elements in the Israelis’ resilience.
“When some kind of terrorism act happens, we mourn and express our sympathies to the families involved,” he says. “On the other hand, we toughen up. We never want to get down to the point where we say, ‘That’s it. Let’s lock the gate and go somewhere else.’ People who emigrated out of pure Zionism left Israel during a time when buses were blowing up. They were so threatened and hysterical, so yeah, it’s a big issue for us, but it doesn’t define us as a people.”
Dr. Merose believes the emotional climate is shifting as communication about these issues becomes socially acceptable.
“The importance of sharing and communicating has definitely become much more clear to everyone,” he says. “Expressing your emotions is a much more legitimate thing now than in previous generations.”
A Shared Memory
Like the Israelis, British people who were young during and just after the Second World War share a collective memory of enduring extreme hardship together. That, too, creates community.
“In my lifetime, people in Europe have a framework of ‘life is bloody hard and tough; if we survive, well and good. If we don’t, that’s just hard luck,’” says Peter Jones, a retired investment banker and Commander of the British Empire.
Although the United States suffered through the Great Depression, he says, “You didn’t have the impact of two world wars.”
Noting that more than 40 million people were killed in each war and another five million were killed in ethnic fighting as boundaries and borders changed and people tried to grab territory, Mr. Jones says, “There was a long, long period of huge uncertainty, shortness of life, loss of life and injuring and maiming. That tends to color your view of the world.”
In the United States, we are living in a long cycle of stability without a cycle of violence that consumed all of Europe. His position on historical realities includes the recognition that “a long cycle of hardship can happen to anyone at any time.”
For Liz Turner, a lifelong resident of London, continual bomb threats from the Irish Republican Army seasoned her.
“We had years and years with four, five bomb scares a week. Pretty much, the feeling was ‘fuck ’em.’ I will not be made to feel intimidated in my city,” she says. “One doesn’t do things that are unnecessarily dangerous but you can’t let these things ruin your life or everything would stop. There is no way you can institute enough security measures when you have millions of people coming into London every day. Of course, the possibility of a terrorist attack was troubling, but you still had to go on the Tube to go to work. You could not call your office to say, ‘There was a bomb threat. I’m not coming into work.’ That would have made as much sense as staying home because it was raining.”
Jacqui Lait, a member of Parliament from 1992 to 2010, served as Shadow Minister of London on July 7, 2005, when 52 were killed and 700 injured after radical Islamic suicide bombers staged four separate attacks in Underground trains and a city bus. In the 1970s, Jacqui and I worked in a London newsroom together and shared a flat.
“The difference between Islamic terrorism and the I.R.A. is that the I.R.A. always phoned and warned the police,” she says. At the time, she and her husband, Peter Jones, lived close to one of the bomb sites.
“We heard it. The glass shook,” she says. “We knew exactly what it was but there was nothing we could do except keep clear and let the medical experts get on with it.”
She attributes her mindset of endurance to having grown up in the post-war era.
“Even more than after the First World War there were shortages of everything: heat, light, water, food, and clothes.
“You got your head down and got through it. You used ingenuity to solve problems,” she says. “When there were insufficient food supplies to make a wedding cake, people got creative and made cardboard shaped cakes, which they decorated. Our grandchildren and the younger generation don’t comprehend that level, but they do absorb the ethos of ‘absorb the shock and keep going.’ ”
As she was working in the House of Commons during the suicide bombing attacks of 7/7/05, Ms. Lait was not directly affected.
“The first thing we heard was there had been a catastrophic power failure in the Underground. I don’t know whether the House of Commons was isolated for security reasons or whether the authorities shut down all telecommunications, so there was enough space for what they needed to do,” she recalls.
There was no cell phone service, just like during the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Unable to call her husband, she was able to email him so that he knew she was safe. From her window, she could see hundreds of people walking home across Westminster Bridge.
“There were no buses, no traffic, and no panic,” she says. “If it’s got my number on it, it’s got my number on it. And the chances of that are fairly low. You are more likely to get knocked down by a bus than blown up by any bomb. If one allows these attacks to affect you, the terrorists have won.”
London psychologist Dr. Laura Haigh says that anxiety has increased in the wake of the terrorist attack on pop singer Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester on May 22, 2017, when twenty-three people were killed and 250 people were wounded. That was followed by an incident on London Bridge on June 3, when terrorists used a van as a weapon of destruction and then ran into a nearby market, using knives to stab people—bringing a total body count of eight dead and forty-eight wounded. Not quite a month later, a massive fire engulfed the Grenfell Tower, a high-rise apartment building in London, causing more than eighty fatalities.
“When I spoke to the firefighters, they felt so helpless,” says Shawn Starbuck, public information officer for the British Fire Brigades Union (FBU). “It was big. They were doing the best job they could with not enough resources. There were people we knew we couldn’t get.”
Dr. Haigh lost a friend of a friend in Grenfell Tower. Another friend was on London Bridge one month earlier when the van attack occurred.
“It makes you on edge. It makes you think about how easy it would be for someone to bomb the Tube,” she says. “Statistically, you are more likely to get run over by a drunk driver or get a nasty illness. Something about the nature of being targeted to be killed by terrorists does something to your sense of safety.”
Dr. Haigh draws upon Buddhist literature when counseling people who report anxiety due to an increase in violent news. Recognizing that it is more difficult for someone who lost a loved one in the attack and for anyone who witnessed one, she looks for balance between paradoxically distinctive modalities.
“I use mindfulness and meditation in my practice,” she says. “Who are we to be outraged that we suffer things? It’s a part of life everywhere.”
Dr. Haigh also integrates what she calls Beirut/Tel Aviv mentality.
“You have to go out and do things and act like it’s not going to happen,” she says. “Go out and live your life.”
Finding Freedom
Wolfgang Christoph grew up under a repressive East German regime.
“Although I was a kid, I knew something was inherently wrong. We could not criticize or even joke about people in charge. We could not listen to Western radio stations because if you did you got arrested,” he says, recalling the hours spent waiting in line, hoping for a food truck delivery. “If you are the last in line, there is no food for the day. Then at night you have to go to the field in secret to look for vegetables. If you got caught you got arrested. Religion was outlawed and talking about God or philosophy could get you arrested and sent to a ‘re-education’ camp.”
Until the time he was ten years old, no physical border existed between East and West Germany but on August 13, 1961, the Berlin Wall was constructed, seemingly overnight.
“We visited my grandmother in West Berlin,” Mr. Christoph says, recalling that he always slept over at his best friend’s house when he went to his grandmother’s. At sunrise on August 14, he woke up to the sight of soldiers, trucks, and construction equipment.
“People were jumping out of fifth-story windows,” he says, “getting caught on barbed wire and getting shot. I was in East Berlin and my family was in West Berlin. It was traumatic.”
Three weeks later, the ten-year-old jumped into the river that divides East and West Berlin and swam across while soldiers were shooting at him. Fortunately, he was reunited with his family that same day.
In 1977, at the age of twenty-six, Wolfgang Christoph immigrated to the United States and became one of the nation’s first inspirational life coaches. He has given hundreds of motivational talks about his experience and recently published his first book Sohni: The Human Will Against the Forces of Destiny. Sohni is the nickname given to him by his grandfather.
Escaping to freedom transformed the boy’s worldview.
“The point is that we never know what life brings. In an instant life can change. We can have a tsunami, earthquake, drive-by shooting, or slip in the shower and life is never the same,” he says. “We have much more to be grateful for than we realize.”
As a young adult, Mr. Christoph embarked on a worldwide journey for meaning. He lived with Eskimos, bush people in Ghana, desert tribes in the Sahara, and reindeer herders in the northern tundra. In Japan, he studied to become a Buddhist monk, but instead, he decided to return to southern California to become a life coach.
“When you’re living with people in different places, they have the same hardships as we do and feel the same as we do. Yet they value their lives differently. Life has meaning. There is no thinking something else is better.”
Acknowledging the positive power of the first gift—humility—Mr. Christoph believes equanimity under acute stress conditions comes down to the importance of accepting life instead of wanting things to be different.
“I was looking to find out who I am and to find the meaning of life. When I came back, I realized it was already within me,” he said. “Once you realize that, it is an enormous awakening that will never leave you. In that split second, you already discovered your true self. Now you want to give it away to inspire others.”
The heart of his message is “to find that spark in someone else and illuminate that to help that person find peace in himself.”
He believes this principle is equally valid for anyone whose life has been disrupted by tragedy.
“Part of a catastrophe is looking at your values and expectations,” he says. “Because this is not what you thought it would be, it is an opportunity to examine your thinking and ask, ‘What wisdom is appearing before my eyes? What can I be learning?’”
In this new reality, we have no idea of what’s coming next. We never have, although we believed so. As the pace and strength of disasters increases, so does uncertainty. If nothing else, uncertainty teaches that predictability is an illusion.
Dancing on the edge of uncertainty can be scary, exciting, or both. In any case, it can open your vision.
“When we are not in control, beauty appears,” says Mr. Cristoph. In recalling his childhood, he now reflects that “there is beauty in that maybe there won’t be a cabbage for me at the end of the day. And there is raw beauty when we focus in that moment because all our plans, goals, and spreadsheets are blown away.”
Keys to Becoming Stronger in the Broken Places