Finding the ‘labels’ of your own identity — the words that describe who you are — can be a powerful and empowering experience. Yet all of us are also labelled by others, and they may see in us attributes that do not match how we see ourselves.

Bullies and their victims are as much iconic figures in school life as rock stars and cowboys. Lately anti-bullying crusaders have spoken out against bullying in all its forms. As laudable as these measures are, I fear denunciation and zero-tolerance policies at schools do not address the difficult truths of bullying.

We seem to have lost something. What it might be is hard to say. But it has something to do with our willingness to reckon with the truth.

There’s no shortage of discourse and debate out there right now, but what happened to keeping it civil? All too often, what passes for debate on politics or the economy or the environment is little more than a steady stream of sensationalistic attacks and unreasoned cajoling.

Ludwig Guttman is one of the unsung heroes of our times, the man who transformed the life chances and expectations of millions of spinally-injured people throughout the world, and who — incidentally — was the founding father of the international Paralympic movement.

Buying into a particular life script — a sequence of life stages that define what we do and when we do it — is easy to do without full consideration. Are we living old, inadequate scripts or are we adapting to new times and circumstances?

Charlie Sheen and Bernie Madoff are just two of the latest examples showing that yes, character really does matter. As I state in the title of one of my books, character disturbance is the phenomenon of our age.