Essay Questions

Explain Wallis's ideology of cracking a crisis.

Wallis writes, “When you start with the wrong questions, no matter how good an answer you get, it won’t matter very much. There was a shift that occurred throughout the week that you might not have seen in the television coverage, as participants began to ask a very different question: “How will this crisis change us?” If our goal is to get back to business as usual, we will soon be right back to want got us into so much trouble, because what was usual is exactly what got us here in the first place.” Wallis infers that catastrophes ought to be utilized as learning openings to inaugurate the tenets that should be embraced to thwart similar predicaments from emerging. Questions that are posed after a catastrophe dictate whether the appropriate mitigating resolves will be formulated. Instead of focusing on the termination of a disaster, people must make sure to study the avenues that enabled the calamity.

Explicate the connotation of the voice ‘we’.

Throughout the text, Wallis utilizes the voice ‘ we’. For example, he stresses, “So the question that underlies this book is a simple but hard one: ‘How will this crisis change us?’ The answer isn’t going to be found in reading the newest economic analysis, hoping for better indicators, following political ideology, or even updating the economy. It will be found as individuals, families, friends, small groups, churches, mosques, synagogues and entire communities wrestle with the question of values together. We need to find where we made our wring turns. “The voice ‘we’ accentuates that societal catastrophe should be cracked by all entities who are openly and indirectly foundations of the catastrophe. An individual would not single-handedly resolve a disaster through devout application of values. Communal discourses can aid in handling crisis that are attributed to the dearth of values.