You need to be hyper-aware because it's your survival at stake.

How is it possible to live in world where people can rule millions of others? It's incredible! It's like we've gone back to the 12th century. That's what happens when you decapitate intelligentsia and repeatedly traumatize and brutalize a country for decades on end: you do not get virtue. Victims do not make nice people.

The more I've traveled to war zones, the more I'm convinced that the impact and the effects are way beyond anything we can even begin to imagine.

If you're young and inexperienced you might accept what people tell you, that everything's going to be fine, it's okay. It's usually other young people saying that, who don't know any better. It's good to have a survival instinct because increasingly, especially in the whole Arab Spring sort of violence, you're mostly with young people who have not experienced what they're doing before.

I think it's deeply important for us to know, especially when we come from the outside, how "ordinary people" think and feel and what their expectations are and what their concerns are. Also what's in their imaginations, what's in their minds, even what their rumors are and what their gossip is.

Life has become terribly insecure. It's on the vortex of civil war. It's difficult to know how America will bring it back from the brink and build up good will.

That's what's terrible about wars when whole societies adopt an impulse of objectification. Everything becomes black and white.