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Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Friday, December 4, 2015
The Definition of Terrorism: Fear in the Air
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Fear in the Air, Americans
Look Over Their Shoulders
by N. R. Kleinfield | Dec. 3,
2015
The killings are happening
too often. Bunched too close together. At places you would never imagine.
As the long roll call of mass
shootings added a prosaic holiday party in San Bernardino,
Calif., to its list, a wide expanse of America’s
populace finds itself engulfed in a collective fear, a fear tinged with
confusion and exasperation and a broad brew of emotions. The fear of the
ordinary. Going to work. Eating a meal in a restaurant. Sending children to
school. Watching a movie.
Wendy Malloy, 49, who lives
in Tampa, Fla.,
said she now worried about being caught in an attack on a daily basis, just
doing what anyone does. “When my son gets out of the car in the morning and
walks into his high school,” she said. “When I drop him at his part-time job at
a supermarket. When we go to the movies, concerts and festivals. When I walk
into my office. It is a constant, grinding anxiety. And it gets louder every
single day.”
After all, a festive
gathering of county health workers in San
Bernardino would not seem likely to make the top
million of a list of shooting targets. It was not an iconic symbol of American
freedom or American muscle. It was not a target draped in ideological conflict.
If you were not safe there,
where were you safe? A common office party. That was everywhere. That was
everybody.
A complicated tangle of
emotions has taken hold. For some, the shock of repeated slaughters is leaving
them inured and resigned. With others, there is recurrent bewilderment. And
anger. Why doesn’t the government and law enforcement do more? Why must I feel
so helpless? What world must my children live in? Why won’t it stop already?
Jean O’Sullivan, 54, who
lives in the Los Angeles area and thinks about shootings multiple times a day,
wrote, “Just as I naturally consider how I would survive if there was an
earthquake, now I have added mental contingencies for a shooting — and THAT is
a sad state of affairs!”
In the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings, coming close on the heels of the
Colorado
killings, The New York Times invited people to respond online about their fear of a mass shooting.
More than 5,000 wrote in. In
addition, many others were interviewed on Thursday around the country: teachers
and students and office workers, even some Army veterans who confided that they
felt safer in war zones than on the streets of the United States.
People spoke of being spooked
by gestures once ignored as utterly unremarkable. As one young woman from Massachusetts put it:
“The guy in the corner always looking at his watch or the woman reaching into
her bag too quickly.”
Of course the man is probably
wondering where his date is already. Of course the odds are the woman simply
heard her cellphone vibrate.
But is it? Could it be? Must
I run?
This woman said she planned
to have children in the future, probably not for a decade, and yet she had
already made the decision to home-school them.
By no means is this deep
anxiety causing life to grind to any sort of standstill. Many Americans remain
steadfast that they will not crumple in the face of terrorists or other strains
of mass murderers, foreign or homebred. Some want to buy their own gun. Many
insist they worry more about a car accident or slip in the bathtub befalling
them, statistically more probable events than gun atrocities. People work, go
out, live. But still, a creeping fear of being caught in a mass rampage has
unmistakably settled itself firmly in the American consciousness.
Times readers responded by
the thousands to a simple question: How often, if ever, do you think about the
possibility of a shooting in your daily life?
Any number of people said
that gunmen cross their mind when someone gets up or walks in late to a crowded
movie theater. Is he the one? A 64-year-old man in Charlottesville, Va.,
said he now watched movies exclusively at home. For him, he said, the idea that
“it can’t happen here” is gone.
Others feared that whenever a
work colleague was fired, he would return armed and shooting.
Arthur Grupp, 64, who is the
head custodian of an elementary school in New Hampshire, said, “Every time I
lock the doors at school, I think about it.” His school was having a Homeland
Security training session just as the violence in San Bernardino unfolded.
A person in Denver said that not long ago the fear used
to enter his mind every few weeks. Now it is at least once a day: “Because at
any moment it could be my little brother at school, my siblings running
errands, my parents at work, me on my way to class who could be the next name
having ‘thoughts and prayers’ sent their way.”
A 23-year-old woman in Cleveland said she was
frightened of doing anything and that she “hated this world.”
“Everybody is filled with
what we sometimes refer to as anticipatory anxiety — worrying about something
that is not currently happening in our lives but could happen,” said Alan
Hilfer, the former chief psychologist at Maimonides
Medical Center
in Brooklyn who is now in private practice.
“And they are worrying that the randomness of it, which on one hand makes the
odds of something happening to them very small, that randomness also makes it
possible to happen to them.”
People are able to recite
with precision how often they think about a mass shooting touching them. Every
day. Twice a week. Up to four times a day. Every other day. Every two weeks.
Every time they’re in a crowded space. Whenever her teenagers are out. Every
time she walks into her office and back to the parking garage. Every day. Every
day. Every day.
For a 16-year-old in Berkeley, it is “almost
constantly.”
Tracy Gill, 32, works at the
Joe Van Gogh coffee shop in Durham,
N.C. She finds herself being much
fussier about her public activities. No movies on opening night. When she goes
to a theater, she always sits in the back.
“If there’s a possibility of
there being any kind of danger, I’ll just pick and choose what I’m going to go
to,” she said. “Is it even worth it? I hate that that’s even a thought in my
head.”
A 32-year-old woman in Green Bay, Wis.,
said that she and her husband discussed a plan whenever they were heading to a
place that could be a target. Now, she feels that is everywhere.
Judith Mitchell, 62, who
lives in Austin, Tex., and works for the state, has four
grandchildren and is exasperated that her country cannot solve this. She does
not see why she must live how she does.
“If I’m in a shopping mall,”
she said, “I’m always aware of what’s around me and where I can hide, the
closest exit, where to go, especially if I have a grandchild with me.”
Kevin Bloxom, 50, who lives
in Louisiana,
wrote: “I think where I would hide my kids from shooters every time I am in
public. No matter where. Not just movies or public events. I was in the grocery
store last weekend with my four year old. I found myself scouting places I
could hide my little boy. It’s sad.”
The fear sneaks up on some
people, catches them off guard. Amanda Cusick, 23, a law student in San Francisco, said that
with school demands she barely has time to worry about anything. “I don’t wake
up and think, what if I’m shot today?” she wrote. But then she will be driving
or in a meditative moment, and she thinks, what if her younger sister is shot
and she never sees her again? Does she know whom to contact for her parents’
will?
On Wednesday, after news of San Bernardino had filtered in, a spontaneous discussion
began among several co-workers at a Department of Veterans Affairs medical
center in Manhattan.
The subject was which room to lock themselves in should a gunman arrive.
Emily Johnston, 26, a college
student in Cincinnati,
said that a year ago there was a threat against her university involving guns
and explosives. Ever since, she worries about an attack multiple times a day.
She steers clear of crowded
areas. And the fear infects her sleep. “I have had nightmares in which I am
sitting in class when a gunman enters,” she wrote. “I realize I have nowhere to
go and feel trapped, panicked, helpless. In another nightmare, students are
running from a shooter in one building but there are more than one and another
is waiting.”
How does one navigate this
swirl of emotions?
“I think awareness of your
own fears is the only way to go and to do the things that are soothing and
comforting and distracting to do, and to do things that bring meaning to your
life and bring comfort to other people,” said Dr. Sherry Katz-Bearnot,
assistant clinical professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and
Surgeons. “It’s what your grandmother said: Keep busy.”
Some people find that they
have reached a numbed state of resignation.
Eric Hsu, 37, who lives in Los Angeles and shoots videos for a living, said that
because of the volume of massacres, the San
Bernardino shooting “didn’t even register amongst my
friends and family during dinnertime conversation or on social media.” It was
too common.
“I saw a picture of a woman
being taken out on a gurney,” he wrote. “I go to buildings just like the one in
San Bernardino
all the time. I do my work with innocent and unsuspecting people. Life is fine
until it happens to you. That’s how I feel about it now. I’m fine. Until it
happens to me.”
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