The European Union's summit in Brussels is being dominated by the need to co-ordinate and co-operate in countering terrorism.
This was drawn up by EU interior ministers on 19 March - a week after the Madrid bombings - and then adopted by foreign ministers on 22 March.
In the days when I chaired a (small) hospital "quality assurance" committee, I was frustrated because I could only effect change in response to serious patient injury rather than before bad things happened.
I was young then. I figured it was just the group I was with; that a more forward thinking group would be proactive, not reactive.
It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that humans are hardly ever proactive. It's simply not in us. We can only react to what's happened, not what is likely to happen.
If some alien species writes our obituary, it will read -- "reactive, not proactive".
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