But that’s all over now. A country that has basically ignored foreign affairs since the cold war ended has discovered that foreign affairs has not ignored it. Now suddenly people are ransacking their brains to see if they have opened any envelopes with mysterious white powder over the past two weeks. Now upscalers who once spent hours agonizing over which Moen faucet head would go with their cop-per farmhouse-kitchen sink are suddenly worried about whether the water coming out of the pipes has been poisoned. People who longed for Prada bags at Bloomingdale’s are suddenly spooked by unattended bags at the airport. America, the sweet land of liberty, is getting a crash course in fear.
What we’re learning is that fear has no shape. “Psychologists like to put things in stages if they can,” says Randal Quevillon of the Disaster Mental Health Institute, “but reactions to terrorism don’t come in phases.” Fear and rage and sadness, and all the other things people are experiencing, are passions, not opinions, and so they don’t lend themselves to polling and all the usual tools we have to measure public response.
Some people are paralyzed with fear and talk about building safe rooms in the basement and stocking up on antibiotics and gas masks. Others regard all these precautions as useless, or even hysterical overreactions. Most people, meanwhile, are afraid and not afraid at the same time, or else they are afraid or not depending on the time of day, their mood, whatever bit of news they’ve just heard. “A senior professor told me he doesn’t want to fly,” says Daniel Creson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Medical School and a veteran of many disaster-relief efforts. “He admits that it’s safe, but he still doesn’t want to fly.”
Creson describes a two-track response to terror. The daylight, rational part of the brain is full of reassurance, but the deeper, instinctual part is not so sure. Even when we are outwardly calm, we are inwardly anxious. “Reason gets set aside,” he says. “We are surrounded by reinforcers of the emotional response. In any emergency situation rumors always run rampant.” Even the U.S. government seems to be responding in this dual way. The president tells everybody that it’s best to go back to normal life. The Justice Department is full of dark forebodings. This schizoid message only magnifies public anxiety; the people who know all the secrets can’t decide whether it’s best to head for the hills or the shopping malls. As it says in the Book of Exodus, “I will send my terror before you and will throw into confusion all the people.”
In Israel, where this atmosphere is the normal state, people try to impose order on their situation. They strategize: this road usually gets hit in the mornings, so I’ll feel safe driving here in the afternoon. The rules are unreliable, but they make people feel better. Experts in the United States also say it is important to do something to minimize the amount of randomness in your life. “People need as much stability as possible. Eat meals at a normal hour,” says Mitchell Jeffrey, who is president of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation in Ellicott City, Md. “We need normality. We need structure.”
But there is one essential fact that should help us get a handle on things. What happened on Sept. 11 was no act of nature, like an earthquake or a storm. It was perpetrated by men who get up in the morning, who have weaknesses, who can be beaten. We are not passive victims of forces larger than we can control. We don’t just have fears; we have enemies. This isn’t just a crisis; it’s a problem that can be addressed.
In a fundamental way, this is different from the risks we are used to facing–the risk of getting cancer, the risk of dying on the highway, the risk of allowing the kids to go biking around the neighborhood–because in this case, we as a nation can fundamentally change the odds.
When you look at countries that face this sort of test, you find a distinctive mentality. They think like a nation. The British remember the period of the blitz fondly because for a time their class-riven society was united. The morning after one of the first attacks, Winston Churchill, born in Blenheim Palace, climbed on some rubble in a poor section of London and addressed the crowd. “Are we downhearted?” he bellowed. And the crowd roared, “No!” When the bombs hit Buckingham Palace, the queen said she was glad she got attacked because now she could “look the East End in the face.” The Brits knew that there was no way individually to protect your family from Hitler. One had to put one’s faith in the Royal Air Force, in Churchill and in the authorities.
In Israel today, the response is similar. Israelis do respond to threats as individuals–who left that McDonald’s bag on that bench?–but by and large they know they can’t build their own private sanctuaries from terror, their own little safe rooms in back of the house. They have to tackle the problem together. In times of crisis they rally behind their leaders, even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who used to be one of the most polarizing individuals on earth. Israelis can be harsh with each other, but they defer to the security guards who check their backpacks at the mall entrances. They put their faith in the Army. The top generals are nationally known (whereas how many Americans can name even one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?). “The security services get the benefit of the doubt,” says David Makovsky, former diplomatic correspondent for Ha’aretz. “The public assumes those guys are doing the right thing. They’re almost sacrosanct.”
Israel, divided on so many issues, is united by the media. There are 48 news bulletins every day. The evening news programs are prime-time broadcasts. People are addicted to current events. When there are major killings, there is a national grieving process. Some Israeli journalists were struck by the fact that whereas their media often broadcast the funerals of terror victims, the American media don’t. The Israeli journalists are motivated by a sense of national solidarity, the Americans by a respect for privacy.
It’s going to be hard for Americans to think like a nation. This is an individualistic society. We’ve spent much of the past few decades building little private paradises for ourselves. We’ve renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, Jacuzzis and gas grills. We withdrew from public life, often not even bothering to vote. It goes against the American grain to defer to government. The hairs stand up on the back of our necks when we see our leaders keeping secrets from us, or when we hear a politician say, “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” This is a decentered nation in which people figure they can look after themselves.
But the other key fact about America is that this is a nation never actually corrupted by affluence; it only looks that way at certain times. Pearl Harbor cleansed the nation of a sort of isolationism that had been metastasizing for decades. After the end of World War II, many people thought that America would again withdraw from the world. Averell Harriman worried that Americans “just wanted to go to the movies and drink Coke.” But in fact Americans rose to the Soviet challenge with a patient, if contentious, resolve.
Perhaps Sept. 11 will get people interested in politics and public life again–even in foreign affairs. Already the country has united around George W. Bush; a lot of Democrats had to put away a lot of bitter feelings about Florida in order to do that. Already there has been a surge in confidence in government’s ability to tackle this problem, even if they don’t fill us in on many of the details. So far the fear that is so prevalent in the country has not led to panic or hysteria; it’s served as a cleanser, washing away a lot of the self-indulgence of the past decade.
The latest NEWSWEEK Poll indicates that the American people possess the virtue that hasn’t been talked about much over the past weeks as a national trait: courage. Forty-eight percent of Americans think another terror attack is very likely–an even greater number than just after Sept. 11–and 37 percent think one is somewhat likely. Almost one in five says she or he is having trouble sleeping, and about half are less likely to take an overseas trip. But overwhelmingly, Americans still approve of the president’s course and want to press forward with the war, even if it takes ground troops and involves casualties. In other words, Americans seem so far to be able to face up to their fears and transcend them. Ultimately, the trauma has revived the old adage that while our friends remind us of what we can do, our enemies remind us of what we must do.
