Our country may have to rethink what it means to be secure
(Editor's note: This column originally appeared in the Sept. 12, 2001, editions of the Daily Herald.)
We are no longer the America we were.
As the twin towers of the World Trade Center toppled in Tuesday's unimaginable terrorist attack, so did the United States' sense of invulnerability — vanishing in a plume of smoke and debris that dwarfed the nearby Statue of Liberty.
For the first time, war was not something military men and women go off to fight in a foreign land. This horror was a visitor that dropped onto American landmarks, devastated cities, slaughtered civilians at random and forever wounded our American psyche.
The most powerful nation on earth was buckled by a handful of suicide bombers, transforming Sept. 11 — 9/11 — into our new date that will live in infamy.
“This is a new chapter; it absolutely is,” says Bernard Beck, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University.
“This is not just war. Wars have a certain logic to them. People see them coming. They know what they are about. As horrible as they are, they fit in the normal run of things,” Beck says. “This is out of nowhere. It upsets everything that the world is about. ... This shakes the whole concept of what is safe and dangerous.”
“On a wide scale, what this does is puncture our bubble of security,” says Michael Wessells, a professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., and an international expert on peace and conflict. “I'm as shaken as everyone else is right now.”
As a nation, we've talked, written and made movies about our fear of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Now we have more to fear than fear itself.
We have commercial airplanes full of regular Americans hijacked and crashed, skyscrapers toppled to the street, the Pentagon in flames, the Sears Tower empty as Chicago follows the fear that forced the evacuation of every American symbol from the White House to Wrigley Field, from Disney World to Woodfield Shopping Center.
Beneath a bright sunny sky, eerily empty after the closing of our airports, parents from Naperville to Nebraska pulled their children from school, motivated by panic, a desire to mourn our nation's loss with loved ones, or perhaps just to spend a few more hours relishing a childhood that is not as innocent as it was the day before.
In the 1950s, schoolchildren practiced hiding under desks amid fears that the Russians were coming, notes author Studs Terkel. That “Evil Empire” never showed, but Tuesday's nightmare marked the arrival of a new enemy.
“We are stunned, startled, horrified and outraged as one should be in the face of horror,” Terkel says. But the 89-year-old author and working class historian quickly notes we are not unique.
“It is something that happens in the Third World, and we see it and casually say, ‘Yes,' “ Terkel says. “And now it's happened here. That makes it different, doesn't it?”
Noting that “what I am saying isn't going to be popular,” Terkel adds, “we've played a role in some of that.” Even as our government vows to punish whoever is responsible for the attacks, Terkel warns, “We must face this not as a superpower, but as a nation of people.”
Terrorism is a cancer, Terkel notes, and “a real honest-to-God doctor wants to get at the root of the cancer.”
“I think it's curable, too,” Terkel adds, urging our government to respond not by wiping out our enemies, but by using “the power of common sense and the power of humanity.”
There are so many unanswered questions, and the enemy is not as easily defined as old evils such as Hitler and the Nazis. Many Americans still may be in a state of denial.
“This is like a bad movie,” notes Dr. Marilyn Kraus, an associate professor of psychiatry at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood. “While we intellectually know this is going on, it hasn't sunk in yet.”
Listening to news accounts on the radio, Kraus says the unreal descriptions sounded like something out of Orson Welles' radio hoax, “War of the Worlds,” which panicked some people when it aired in 1938.
More media-savvy today, we may be used to seeing our cities explode in movies with spectacular special effects, but we can't fathom that scene coming to us live on the TV news
“Nobody was prepared — having seen ‘Independence Day' or ‘Armageddon' or whatever, hasn't prepared anybody,” Beck notes, unwilling to guess the status of the American psyche on the next day, the next year or the next generation.
“It's a new period in world history, and that means it is a new period in human psychology,” Beck says. “We'll all have to wait and see.”
But the attacks, in which “civilians really were the tools for the implementation of terror,” force us into a “great rethinking of what it means to be secure,” Wessells says.
“It's like a vault that contains all our fears,” he says, explaining how this new horror feeds the fear already lingering from school shootings and homemade violence. “Who could unleash such horror and terror? It's so unimaginable, it brings us face to face with terror and the question of what kind of world we live in.”
War-weary and war-wary people expect terrorism and take precautions, Wessells notes. Citizens of Belfast or the Middle East know better than to sit by the airport windows.
“Here, we don't think in those terms,” Wessells says. “That has changed forever.”