The September 11th attack | Coping with the aftermath
Americans' illusion of safety shattered
By James R. Healey and Stephanie Armour
USA Today
"With the economy, we had already been sliding into concern. The attacks were the banana peel that threw us up into the air," says Paul Kettl, chairman of psychiatry at Penn State University's Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
Associated Press
The 1990s were defined by faith that the economic boom would last forever and that the answer to everything lay somewhere in the electronic ether of the World Wide Web. Americans spent a lot, job-hopped and gambled on stocks of unprofitable Internet startups.
A display advertises the countdown for a furniture store going out of business in Plano, Texas. As they continue to worry about whether fresh horrors will follow the Sept. 11 attacks, many Americans are cutting their personal expenditures substantially.
Now the boom is over. The Web has generated more questions than answers, and Internet stocks have made paupers of the well-heeled. What faith we have left seems divinely directed, and risk is shunned.
Surveys find Americans jumpy about whatever is the latest threat.
Roughly half are worried about mail since anthrax incidents, and more than half believe the anthrax-infected mail is the beginning of a terror campaign involving the deadly toxin, according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll.
An earlier poll, before the United States began bombing Afghanistan, showed that nearly 60 percent of Americans worried that they or someone in their families would be victims of a terrorist attack. Only 14 percent weren't worried at all.
The nervous situation "is not something that will be ended soon," says Jerrold Post, terrorism expert and former CIA psychological profiler.
"The illusion of safety in the United States is shattered forever," says Washington, D.C., psychologist Dorree Lynn. "People don't know whether to buy houses, sell houses or rent. They don't know whether to move someplace they consider safe or stay put. Even normally decisive people are having trouble making decisions."
She tells of a CEO in his 50s, usually hard-bitten, who was unable to fire an employee. The Sept. 11 attacks made the CEO hypersensitive to family matters and quick to empathize with the employee. The CEO got counseling and was able to dismiss the worker.
"People are pulling in, in a way that's very noticeable, and it could become more ominous," says Clifford Egan, history professor at the University of Houston. "People have been shell-shocked: 'Holy cow!' "
Americans are buying fewer homes — sales fell 12 percent in September — and other big-ticket items.
Nervous and tight-pursed consumers could harm themselves — courting the very danger they're fleeing.
"They could be saying, 'I'll just hope the duct tape stops that leak in the pipe,' " instead of calling a plumber, says David Heim, managing editor at Consumer Reports magazine. That almost guarantees they'll have to "spend a lot of money in a hurry later," he says, pinching them more then and contributing nothing to the economy now.
People will "change their locus of focus," says Elliott Masie, president of technology think tank The Masie Center. "Maybe someone who would have flown somewhere might drive 2 1/2 hours instead."
That might have begun.
"Americans are feeling it an especially good time to spend time with family, to circle the wagons," says Peter Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover, which advises energy buyers and sellers.
Life continues, of course, but at a more jumpy level.
"I lived in Ireland two years right out of college, and I remember thinking that everybody would stop all daily life every time a car bomb went off. Didn't happen," Masie recounts.
But threats weren't ignored: "People became more cautious. You looked where you parked, knew there were certain neighborhoods you didn't go into. It's like the people of an older generation in London during the Blitz say, 'Oh, yeah, when the sirens came on, we went to the bomb shelters.' People make it part of their lives."
Stephen Couch, sociology professor at Penn State, says, "We grew accustomed to the fallout shelters. We learned to put the (atomic) bomb in the back of our minds. We'll learn to live with these new risks, too. We'll still be looking for more security, but we'll feel more comfortable and come out of our shells."
