'Panic not something we should embrace': Keeping cool heads amid new nuke fears
Chicago TribuneAug 18, 2017
"I think the thing that is scary right now is we have two really unpredictable leaders who seem to be going toe to toe," said Mackinnon, 61, who grew up during the Vietnam War and remembers diving under her desk and covering her head in grade school during nuclear-attack drills.
Twenty-year-old
"It's entertainment at this point," said Perovic, of
The varying reactions demonstrate the wide range of emotions
It's a spectrum that doesn't surprise psychologists and sociologists, who reason that people's historical experience, temperament and knowledge of current events all factor into the way they ingest world news. But it leaves city leaders and school administrators to navigate a delicate balance between offering enough support without causing unnecessary alarm, officials say.
"Panic is not something that we should embrace right now," said
As faculty members in his department prepare for the start of fall classes, Wang said he has advised them to engage students in conversation about international affairs but to encourage active participation in the democracy, rather than fear.
"Life still has to go on," Wang said. "I'm hoping that advisers in this situation will be able to advise students to keep a cool head."
"Sometimes I sit down and think, 'What am I going to do if it actually happens? Where am I going to hide? What am I going to do for the next 50 years during the nuclear winter?'"
And while social media can be a platform for both spreading and tamping down panic, Bondarenko said she's usually able to calm her own fears quickly using technology at her disposal. It allows her to find factual information about world affairs and also lean on her peers for emotional support.
"One factor that probably doesn't make us panic is because we are living in a very virtual world, where we are all on Instagram, Facebook and Google and we hardly go off our computers," she said.
In the 1980s, amid fears of a nuclear showdown with the
The ordinance went so far to say that civil defense programs "purporting to prepare for nuclear attack (are) futile and dangerous" and prohibited local participation in such programs.
Friday, the city's
In
"That hasn't been a conversation yet," said
But at
Staff members at the campus Wellness Center plan to visit dormitories, train student leaders and produce write-ups with tips for students, said director
"A lot of students have definitely felt the impact from last year from political rhetoric, coming as an intrusion into the academic space," Ritzman said. "I think we're kind of expecting more of the same."
As an academic,
"What's remarkable about my generation, people who didn't go through all that duck-and-cover stuff in the 1950s, is that we kind of take it for granted that there's not going to be a nuclear war," said Immerwahr, 37. "My parents' generation is just marked by this expectation that this is the worst thing that could happen."
Talking about such fears can have an impact on how they're processed, experts say. Younger people in general may be more apt to discuss their emotions than their older peers, he said.
Meyers said exercise, getting enough sleep and drawing support from others can help people deal with the stress.
"People experience threat in different ways," Meyers said. "There's lot of variability."
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