Can Washington get beyond unilateral, unthinking responses to play successfully in such a new, complex environment?
The debate on the implications of last week's terrorist atrocities in the US has provoked a typically unthinking response from sections of the political right: these were acts of pure evil to which a more assertive application of western power is the only necessary response; there are no other conclusions to be drawn and anyone who suggests otherwise is an "apologist for evil".
September 21, David Clark: The debate on the implications of last week's terrorist atrocities in the US has provoked a typically unthinking response from sections of the political right.
These struggles challenged white Americans to understand black enlistment in the Union military not as an unthinking or inevitable response to Lincoln's invitation, but as a self-conscious moral and political act.
He added: "The motley Londoners who face down the creatures are so inept and unthinking in their response to the catastrophe that the uncharitable part of you may decide that they deserve their probable (but not guaranteed) fates during what panicked television commentators label Z-Day".
Your notice of default may be your immediate and unthinking response when you're offered the first opportunity to sell out something you have worked for, something you believe in, your instant: "Yes.
But I get panicked, anguished, desperate, grief-stricken phone calls: 'How could Moynihan have said there's no health-care crisis?' On health care, if you say anything — like 'I don't think this construct is going to work as you've described it' — you get an unthinking response.
"Not a chance," came my instant, unthinking response.
It's a bummer that her success elicits such unthinking responses, though it's also predictable because the stakes for women are high and the access to real filmmaking power remains largely out of their reach.
It's about becoming aware of how the diverse internal and external stimuli we face can provoke automatic, immediate, unthinking responses in our thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Tommy's response to her unthinking snobbery is to recite his family history: grandfathers who toiled as sandhogs and construction workers, a police officer father and a mother who is a nurse.
