Tragedy rearranges our priorities

Americans rethinking views of life, security in aftermath of terrorism

09/16/2001

By VICTORIA LOE HICKS / The Dallas Morning News

I live in downtown Dallas. Here is my morning routine:

Take the dog downstairs and into a nearby field. Turn. Look up.

Mentally tick off each of the skyscrapers, making sure they're all there, where they belong.

The unthinkable has become thinkable. A 110-story building and everything in it can implode in a hail of stomach-churning confetti.

"Our lives will never be the same," first lady Laura Bush said on TV.

"America will never be the same," my friend Julie said on the phone.

"Yes, it will change us," said Dr. Daniel Creson, who has studied what violence does to people in places such as Sarajevo and Kosovo. "Kent State changed us. Martin Luther King's marches changed us. During the Civil War, the draft riots in New York City changed us."

And Oklahoma City, and Columbine, and the Challenger and JFK and Pearl Harbor ...

And yet we get up, get the kids off to school, go to work, maybe in a skyscraper. Maybe even get on an airplane.

We may have to show our driver's license 10 times before we get on that plane. We may have to show our company ID badges to get into our office buildings.

Today, we're probably glad someone is checking. In six months, their vigilance may annoy us – if they're still being so vigilant.

Six months from now – please, God – along with Tuesday's experience, we will have experienced 175 days in which catastrophe didn't happen. It will still be thinkable; it just won't fill our TV screens and our consciousness.

We will be changed people – but perhaps not changed to the degree, or in the ways, that seem inevitable today.

"Our view of the world changes every day," said Dr. Martha Haun, who teaches communications at the University of Houston. "None of us are the same people on Sunday that we were on Friday. Life is full of change."

Some changes are bigger than others, she acknowledged, and Tuesday was very, very big.

So big – some people would say – that our psychological foundations, as individuals and as a nation, got rearranged. From now on, they say, we'll feel differently and act differently in perhaps subtle, but fundamental ways.

"This will be a watershed event – even in the extent to which people stay home and hug their children," said Dr. Joan Deppa, who teaches communications at Syracuse University.

She has more than a scholar's familiarity with her subject matter: Syracuse lost 35 students when terrorists obliterated Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

"I'm old enough to recall, after Pearl Harbor, how people rallied together and really did the impossible," Dr. Deppa said. "I have the sense that this will be the same way."

But a lot of smart people study these questions, and not all of them agree that we'll undergo an internal sea change. Some say that, gradually, without our noticing, the horrific images will fade, and that, for the most part, our lives will be much as before.

Dr. Jack Levin of Northeastern University called Tuesday's attacks "the crime of the century." Even so, he said, "a lot of the anxiety people feel now will dissipate in a couple of weeks."

But then again ...

In 1963, I was 11. I still think of that Nov. 22 as The Day the World Fell Apart.

Only it fell apart in extreme slow-motion, in a 12-year slide that encompassed Robert Kennedy's assassination and Dr. King's, and Kent State and Watergate and the fall of Saigon.

Would the assassination of John Kennedy look so epochal if we weren't seeing it through the lens of those compounded losses? We'll never have the luxury of knowing.

Ultimately, much of the impact of Tuesday's carnage "will depend on the events that will happen in the next couple of weeks," said Dr. Karen Sitterle, who teaches psychology in Dallas at the University of Texas Southwestern Health Science Center. "Is the other shoe going to drop?"

If it doesn't, she and other psychologists said, we'll walk a fairly predictable path. We'll feel fear; we'll feel sadness; we'll feel anger.

Anxiety, sleeplessness and nightmares will be "normal reactions," said Dr. Creson, a professor of psychiatry at the UT Medical School at Houston. Ultimately, he and others said, the quality of our lives will depend less on what happened than on how we – as a nation even more than as individuals – act in response.

"We are entering an incredible period of mourning," Dr. Deppa said. "The sharing of common sorrow and common loss is a lot of work."

While anger is natural and even necessary, several psychologists said, if we strike out blindly for revenge or jettison our civil liberties, we will compound the harm.

"We're so insecure now that people think: 'I'd rather be repressed than dead,' " Dr. Levin said. "That's how repression occurs."

This tragedy "has given us a chance to redefine what it means to be an American," Dr. Creson said.

Many people, he said, seem ready to move in the direction of hatred and xenophobia.

"The idea I'm hearing is, 'It doesn't matter if we kill innocents.' "

But loss can also enlarge the spirit.

"I've seen the tremendous goodness that comes out, a million acts of heroism and kindness," said Dr. Sitterle, who counseled the bereaved in Oklahoma City and at the scenes of other disasters.

In memorializing the victims, Americans can also forge a new sense of identity and purpose, Dr. Deppa said. "Those people died in our place," she said. "What the hell are we going to do about that?"

As for the external stuff – security checks and the like – we'll soon cease to take much notice, the experts predicted.

"Some things will change, and they should," Dr. Haun said. "Buying a metal detector for the courthouse is probably something that should have happened a long time ago."

And if flying is never again quite so convenient, Dr. Creson said: "So what?"

We've got a very long way to go, he and others said, before we experience the constant and very realistic fears familiar to people in violence-torn nations, from East Timor to Israel to Guatemala.

"You can move on. I can move on," said Dr. Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict. Next to much of the world's population, he said, "we live in a terror-free environment."

So, six months from now, will I still inventory the skyscrapers? Probably not.

But, then again...

A year or so after the Oklahoma City bombing, I was in Houston. Somebody was tearing down an old grain elevator. Tangles of rebar and chunks of concrete protruded at crazy angles.

The world began to spin; I felt hot and cold all at once; my throat constricted, and my stomach lurched.

Earlier this year, a building near my office was torn down. Driving by each day, I would shield my eyes and stare doggedly at the asphalt immediately in front of my bumper.

It took forever for that building to come down. I cursed it every time I passed.

And if, by chance, in an unguarded moment I glanced in the wrong direction, the world began to spin.

Victoria Loe Hicks covered the Oklahoma City bombing and the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols for The Dallas Morning News.