Source: USA TODAY
Videos of the explosions in Boston show many people, and not just police officers and emergency workers in the line of duty, running toward the danger.
Panic is evident, as it was during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that launched this age of terrorism on American soil. But the instinctive defiance of those running toward the devastation, and the vows in ensuing hours — from the president to individual posters on social media — to focus on the victims and the recovery and justice, is a striking reminder of how Americans have adjusted since that initial shock more than 12 years ago.
The community arose at the moment that community was attacked.
“If you want to know who we are, what America is, how we respond to evil, that’s it: Selflessly, compassionately, unafraid,” President Obama said Tuesday.
People — and a population — have adjusted, said Emanuel Maidenberg, director of a cognitive behavioral therapy clinic at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
While studies have shown that the fear and shock lingers the closer you are to the trauma, he said, “it does make sense that we are collectively likely to be less fearful, or at least for a shorter period of time, before we move into that other stage of acting in a way that will either get us out of this fearful state, or simply do what justice requires.”
He added: “As a group of people we are somehow hardened by what happened on 9/11, and more able to deal with it.”
In the hours and days after 9/11, the shock was palpably wrapped in fear and an overwhelming sense of foreboding.
The dominant images then were of the twin towers falling and panicked people running in the other direction. There were countering images of rescuers going to their deaths into burning towers or planting flags in the rubble of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. But the defiant counterattack on Flight 93 was not immediately known. The unknown was new, and the worse was expected. Two days after those attacks, two out of three Americans told Gallup that more attacks were likely in coming weeks.
Were the nation’s leaders safe? Was anyone safe?
A broader defiant community didn’t take hold until George W. Bush stood in the rubble of the World Trade Center three days after 9/11 and vowed the perpetrators would hear “from all of us.” In Boston, that sense of moving beyond fear to action was immediate — and repeated over again on television and social networks.
“I don’t know if it was a decision made by the TV stations or whether it is incidental or the nature of the event, but it is much better to see the fast, prompt, hopeful response, to see that there are people who are there to help you rather than watching over and over again the traumatizing event,” Maidenberg said.
He said that mass trauma tends to push people into progressive stages of fear and shock, then into a heightened state of vigilance and awareness, and to a thirst for new information to try to understand. But he said one valuable mental health lesson from 9/11 was to “not be overloaded, to not sit at home and watch TV for 10 hours straight — not helpful.”
Instead, he urges people to check in periodically to get reports of fresh information.
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