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In a stinging response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's put-down of "American exceptionalism," Arizona Sen. John McCain told Russians Thursday that Putin "doesn't believe in you."

"He doesn't believe that human nature at liberty can rise above its weaknesses and build just, peaceful, prosperous societies," McCain writes in an op-ed posted by Pravda. "Or, at least, he doesn't believe Russians can. So he rules by using those weaknesses, by corruption, repression and violence. He rules for himself, not you."

McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, is answering Putin's Sept. 11 op-ed in The New York Times.

In that piece, as we reported, Putin "made an unusual and direct appeal to the American people ... to reject President Obama's calls for possible use of force against Syria."

The Russian leader ended his message with this statement:

"My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States' policy is 'what makes America different. It's what makes us exceptional.' It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal."

They never quite get over it.

Whenever there's a mass shooting, a tragedy that occurs with depressing frequency, survivors of earlier events have their own memories brought back vividly and horribly.

Kristina Anderson, one of dozens of people who was shot at Virginia Tech in 2007, now works across the river from Washington, D.C. When the news of the Navy Yard shootings there broke on Monday, her day melted into tears.

It's hard to feel safe when massacres can take place seemingly anywhere — a movie theater or school or even a government building that's supposedly secure.

"For me, it's pretty close to home," Anderson says. "Quickly, I start thinking about the families who are about to be called and the people who are in lockdown in the buildings. I can identify with the feeling of not knowing what's happening."

Not Just About Guns

As the news broke about Monday's shootings, residents of several previously traumatized communities — Aurora, Colo.; Newtown, Conn.; Tucson, Ariz.; Oak Creek, Wis. — were traveling to Washington to lobby Congress for broader background checks on gun sales.

"It brings you back to square A when you see something like what happened at the Navy Yard," Amardeep Kaleka, whose father was killed in the Sikh temple shootings in Oak Creek last year, told a local television station. "You just start to unravel at your core because everything you thought couldn't happen is happening."

The Navy Yard shootings came a week after much of the political media had run obituaries on gun-control efforts, given the recalls of two Colorado state senators who were ousted for having supported stricter gun laws.

"We can debate endlessly about gun issues, but frankly we might get nowhere on it," says Oak Creek Mayor Steve Scaffidi.

But he says something has to be done about recognizing "patterns of violence" in people who might be mentally unstable and potentially capable of going on a murderous rampage. Scaffidi says he and other mayors of towns that have experienced massacres are working on a set of proposals that they hope to present soon to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

"It's disappointing and discouraging that a country with as many great minds as we have can't lessen the impact of things like this," he says.

Bringing It All Back

Scaffidi says memories of the immediate aftermath of the killings in his town come flooding back after an event like the Navy Yard shootings.

"Obviously, being in Sandy Hook, there's heightened anxiety anytime there's news about a shooting," says Candice Bohr, executive director of Newtown Youth and Family Services, a mental health center.

Phones there have been ringing pretty consistently this week, she says. But there's nothing new about that. She notes that a number of teenagers have been killed recently in car accidents in the area.

"It could be anything," Bohr says. "It's not necessarily a mass shooting that triggers what people have anxiety about."

'Don't Have The Answers'

Survivors of such events are, for the most part, remarkably resilient. Art McDonnell says he's been able to create a "psychological safe zone," a part of his brain where he stores his memories and locks them away.

McDonnell, who is the mayor of Kirkwood, Mo., was serving on the city council of the St. Louis suburb in 2008, when a gunman entered the chamber at City Hall and began firing, killing McDonnell's predecessor, two colleagues on the council and three other individuals.

Almost any loud noise — a car crash, cannons shot off at historical re-enactments — can bring back memories of the shooting McDonnell experienced.

"It does come forward when you have incidents like this," McDonnell says. "It comes back to you like a quick flashback of everything that happened."

McDonnell belongs to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, but he's not convinced that even ridding the country entirely of guns would end this kind of violence.

"It's not just the gun," he says. "How do we find a way to reach these individuals who perpetrate these horrible crimes? I don't have the answers. I wish I did."

A Renewed Call To Action

There's a danger of becoming inured. There have been so many mass shootings, McDonnell says, that there's a risk individuals and the media will shrug them off, as they already do with car crashes and individual killings in large cities.

Anderson, the former Virginia Tech student, says every successive mass shooting is horrific, but also offers a call to renew her commitment to do something to address the problem.

In her case, she cofounded a company called LiveSafe, developers of a personal safety mobile app that allows people to interact directly with law enforcement agencies.

"It keeps happening and you see more people being traumatized," she says. "History has shown if you push it away, it's only going to keep happening."

A city in northwest Spain issued a rather unusual lost-and-found notice this week:

FOUND: A lottery ticket bought more than a year ago, which entitles the owner to an unclaimed $6.3 million jackpot.

LOST: The ticket's owner.

The little plastic sample tray is empty, but the man behind the counter quickly replaces it with one full of a mooncake cut into teeny-tiny pieces. I grab a piece (okay, a couple) before the jostling crowd behind me can get to it. Samples are, after all, the only reason to visit Costco in the middle of a Sunday. There's a large display of square tins, each decorated with a painting of a Chinese man. I take one back to my mother and ask "Can we get one?"

The mooncake is traditionally only served during the Mid-Autumn Festival, on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunar calendar. They're shared among family and friends as a symbol of wishing prosperity in the coming year. They'll need it, too. A box of four mooncakes generally costs anywhere between $10 and $50 (though more expensive brands can certainly be found), and my parents are usually willing to splurge on the higher end of that scale for their favorite brand.

At home, my family cuts the mooncake into wedges and we eat crowded around the kitchen counter or bent over the sink to avoid spilling crumbs. I've been eating these pastries since I can remember, and I start craving them right at the cusp of fall, as sunsets get earlier and the nights grow colder.

Mooncakes are about the size and heft of a hockey puck, with a thin crust. A dense rich filling of sweetened lotus seed paste envelops the yolk from a salted duck egg. The salty, crunchy yolk crumbles when cut and contrasts with the almost cloyingly sweetness around it. The yolk isn't my favorite part, so my mother gets most of what ends up in my portion. Mooncake fillings are almost always sweet and can be made with different nuts, seeds, or beans. There's a type known as "five kernel mooncake" which, according to my father, is the Chinese fruitcake that's often gifted and re-gifted to unfortunate recipients.

It's a pretty esoteric food (describing them to friends almost always results in furrowed brows and exclamations of "What's lotus root? Wait, a duck egg?!"), and they might seem completely out of place at an American warehouse chain. But I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, one of the United States' largest and fastest growing ethnoburbs, where many of the cities are majority Asian.

In my particular city, Asian grocery stores and businesses exist next to 7-Elevens and McDonalds on streets with names like "Las Tunas" and Del Mar." Instead of a Starbucks on every corner, we had boba – that's a Taiwanese tea drink which has chewy tapioca pearls at the bottom. (The song "Asians Eat Weird Things" was filmed in the Asian supermarket where my family shopped weekly. It's a point of pride that I can say I've eaten most of the featured foods.) It made such sense that Costco — the place where you could find almost anything — would also have mooncakes that it was almost unsurprising to suddenly find them among the granola bars and trail mix.

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