Patrick Kennedy: “I rise to thank Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Sabo for their hard work on this legislation. It is an immense…”

“I rise to thank Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Sabo for their hard work on this legislation. It is an immense challenge to be in charge of the funding of this Nation's homeland security . . . and they have done the best that they can with this bill. In particular, I want to raise an issue that is of concern to me: The need to address and integrate psychological resiliency into our national readiness plans. Building psychological resilience is one of the most effective counter-terrorism strategies we could have, because it fights terrorism on the real battleground--the psyches of the American people. The Israelis have learned this and see resilience development as a key component of counter-terrorism. Referring to terrorism, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said: ``This is all a question of human psychology. It is all a question of understanding how to manage fear. The most important thing to explain to people about managing fear is that courage is not the absence of fear, it is the management of it.'' In Full Committee I offered an amendment to call for a report between the Institutes of Medicine and the Department of Homeland Security on resilience development and how this resiliency can be harmed by the ways in which the media report on terrorism, or can be harmed by the way terrorist threat information is communicated to the public.”