PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
From tragedy springs unity. The worst terrorist attack ever on U.S soil is likely to have one immediate effect on the national psyche: a sense that Americans need to bond against a common threat. "Life as usual stops for everybody," says David Spiegel, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. "We all have to deal collectively with this. It reminds us that we're vulnerable."
Like many people on Sept. 11, John Bodnar, an historian at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., drew a parallel between attitudes he expects to see toward the suicide-plane attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the American reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Back then, the nation rallied around President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This time, "I think political unity and a national resolve will result," adds Bodnar -- with Americans of all political persuasions backing President Bush.
COLLECTIVE ANGER. Other emotions are sure to surface as well, however -- perhaps chief among them a new sense of uneasiness. Americans, who perhaps thought they were immune to the terrorist attacks that have forever changed the way people in other parts of the world live, may no longer feel so sure. "I don't know that our sense of security will be irrevocably shattered, but it certainly has been shaken," says Allan Winkler, a professor and scholar of recent American history at Miami University in Ohio.
The Sept. 11 attacks could be particularly sobering because the number of casualties is likely so high that many Americans will know, at least indirectly, someone who was killed, injured, or otherwise touched by the disaster. "It's six degrees of separation," says Bessel van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University and an expert in trauma. "It will be very personal."
If that anger turns into a collective blind fury, one destructive outcome could be a revival of the xenophobia that has been a recurrent pattern in American history, says Kim Lacy Rogers, a professor of history and American studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. Parallels aren't hard to find; one has only to recall the internment of citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. "There will be a lot of anger in the coming weeks," says Andrew Baum, professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. "People are going to want a strong response."
"RESTORING SANITY." A key test of the leadership of President George W. Bush, Baum and others say, will be whether he can rein in such feelings. "People in authority can play an enormously important role in restoring sanity," adds van der Kolk. He believes that the President's first job is to assist and comfort the victims -- and then to restore a national sense of security.
The next is to mount a dogged and dispassionate hunt for the truth. During a period of such emotional unrest, Baum adds, Americans will be looking for meaning in what happened. It will be up to their leaders in Washington to help them find the answers.
Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
