Editor’s note: In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we retrieved this story, originally published Nov. 16, 2001, from the pre-digital Isthmus archives. In it, staff writer Tom Laskin looked at the ways the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were generating fear among residents of Madison.
Madison is far from the sites of terrorist attacks that have plunged the country into war at home and overseas. The closest case of anthrax contamination — currently the most widespread example of terrorism on the home front — has been in Indiana. But despite our physical distance from the horrors of the World Trade Center immolation and its aftermath, the city hasn’t escaped the blowback of Sept. 11.
Anthrax scares? Laurie Lovedale, information officer for the Madison Fire Department, reports there's been 28 during the past month. (In a normal year, the MFD’s hazardous materials team deals with about 40 total calls, none of them having anything to do with bioterror.)
Hate crimes? The Madison Police Department confirms several such cases, including a particularly dehumanizing one in which an anonymous attacker spit on a Muslim woman while she was walking to work downtown near the City-County Building. And last week a Sun Prairie man was charged with a hate crime for a Nov. 3 incident in which he allegedly smashed the window of a State Street bar with his fist because he saw people of Middle Eastern descent inside. Police found him with blood on his hands yelling “Fucking Arabs” and leveling accusations about plots to blow up bridges in California,
Still, the real threat to our sense of security isn’t wrapped up in any tangible incident. Fear itself is the most insidious aftereffect of the Sept. 11 attacks, and everyone from local mental health experts to the beleaguered head of the county’s Emergency Management team agrees that an abiding fear of the unknown poses more of a danger to the citizenry than any terrorist bomb or disease-ridden envelope.
“For a lot of us in the Midwest, we’re probably not in any more danger than we were before Sept. 11,” says Madison therapist Ann Veilleux. “That’s the rational response, of course. But that’s not what a lot of people are feeling right now. They’re afraid, they feel powerless, they feel that something else is going to happen.”
Thanks to reinforcement by the media and the mind’s capacity for imagining apocalyptic terror scenarios, we’re falling victim to the same extreme fears and emotions that victims of real violence and upheaval experience. The problem will likely get worse, should the country’s current war with al-Qaida and any other terrorist group that wishes us ill stretch out into the coming months and years.
By now, most of us have seen reports on the warning signs of anthrax. Everyone in the country with a mailing address has received an official postcard from the U.S. Postmaster General explaining how to identify a suspicious piece of mail and what to do with it. We’ve learned not to pack nail files and scissors in our carry-on bags, and we’ve grown accustomed to the weekly TV news stories about how safe from terror our little airport really is.
That should make us feel better, but Ray Peña, the man in charge of Dane County Emergency Management, understands that it doesn’t.
“We’ve got really good, well-trained people out there,” says Peña, who acknowledges anthrax scares have severely tested local leaders’ emergency management skills. “Many of these people have also received training in dealing with terrorism. They’re that much better at dealing with this kind of thing and whatever we find ourselves facing. So people shouldn’t freak out. They should know that they can get an assessment from us about any situation. But there's a lot of uncertainty right now, and that’s very hard for anyone to deal with.”
What to do?
Fear works in subtle ways. It's not just when and where terrorists will strike that has people concerned.
Last month a racially mixed, mostly older group of students, faculty and staff attended a listening session at Union South chaired by UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley. No one spoke of bombs blowing up on Library Mall or biochemical agents being distributed in faculty mailboxes. The surprisingly small gathering (after all, this was the chancellor in the flesh, answering impromptu questions face to-face) remained focused on two points: a) the harassment and intimidation of staff and students who appeared to be foreign or Muslim and b) the general sense that the campus had ceased to be a safe, supportive place for people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent.
Wiley, looking official but friendly in his dark, unbuttoned business suit, soaked in everything with a minimum of critical comment. He nodded with interest as a woman with roots in the Punjab wept as she explained how fearful she’d become after the murders of two turban-wearing Sikh men in Seattle post-Sept. 11. She added, “A lot of people of color who do stand up fear that they’ll be singled out for more abuse.” He nodded comfortingly as a faculty member hypothesized on why no one had reported any actionable hate crimes to the campus cops: “It’s the experience of a lot of people of color that they are humiliated when they go to the police with a problem and are not taken seriously.”
But Wiley didn’t — indeed couldn’t — do much to allay the atmosphere of quiet fear that pervaded the room. He displayed a new, improved pamphlet on reporting hate crimes being distributed by UW police. “One thing is for sure,” Wiley told the gathering, “these incidents have touched everyone’s lives.” He looked and acted concerned, but ultimately he seemed impotent. Somehow it wasn’t enough to offer the standard words of reassurance or to present lists of university officials who could deal with the problems of foreign-born and nonwhite students and faculty. Fear of the other is not so easily assuaged.
Going postal
If there’s one place where a sense of foreboding seems justified, it’s the post office. Next to the New York cops and firefighters, postal workers are the folks who’ve most frequently been on the front lines since the conflagrations of Sept. 11.
In Washington, D.C., New York City and elsewhere, postal unions have protested the lack of safety measures taken by management to protect the rank-and-file. Some workers have gone so far as to suggest that the lives of mostly white, wealthy members of Congress are being valued higher than those of the minority postal clerks and sorting machine operators who keep the mail flowing on the East Coast.
But in Madison, according to a local union leader, the fear factor is negligible. “We had a discussion of the whole issue [of anthrax in the mails] last week for quite a while,” says Martin Maier, vice president of the Madison local of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents clerics, mechanics and drivers of bulk delivery vehicles. “But there was no panic or worry or anything. It was just an exchange of information.”
Nor has the issue sowed internal division. “My whole sense of it is that management is sincere,” says Maier. “I think we all understand now that you just can’t take chances with this sort of thing. In the past, if there was some powder on the floor, you just cleaned it up. Not any more. But are people really worried? No, I’d say they're still thinking about hunting on the weekend and what’s going to happen with the Packer game. Of course, if something happens closer to here, that will probably change.”
In fact, says Maier, if there has been a change among local postal workers since Sept. 11 and the onset of anthrax attacks it has to do with his membership’s collective sense of self-esteem. “To be honest with you, I’m pretty proud of our people,” he explains. “Nobody’s been afraid to come to work. Everyone’s been going to work and doing their job. It’s really important to our country that the mail service functions, and they know that. And I think right now they feel appreciated for what they’re doing to make sure that it does function.”
'No control'
While most of us won't ever come into contact with the latest bioengineered weapon of mass destruction, the notion that such a thing could happen in our new terror-modified world is more plausible. And turning over such an idea again and again in one’s mind can be nearly as debilitating as facing off against the real thing,
“Students and just people around town are feeling just a chronic, low-grade stress about all of this,” says Bob McGrath, head of the University Health Services’ mental health program. “And in terms of stress theory, something’s gotta give. People will develop low-back pain, gastrointestinal issues, high blood pressure. In fact, I’d expect to see a fair amount of depression. New cases.”
Already, student health’s University Avenue health facility is seeing an increase in depression and debilitating anxiety disorders. At present, the program can handle all of the requests for help. (The fact that requests for intake consultations were full by the end of October is not unusual; it happens every year when midterms and research papers start coming due.) But McGrath expects — maybe fears is a better word —there may be more to come.
“There’s no control over this,” he says of the growing anxiety he’s picking up on from clinic patients and even his casual contacts on campus. “Something’s happening, and I can’t make a difference. Then a sense of hopelessness sets in. From there, they just slide right into depression.”
The longer this generalized fear persists, the more likely it is to cause specific problems.
“If this goes on for six, seven, eight months, or a year and even more, people begin to feel there’s some level of threat to their well being,” says McGrath. And this will have widespread consequences in terms of strained social relations, he adds.
One of the first signs of stress, explains McGrath, is heightened irritability. “So if you go home and you’re feeling tense and irritable, who do you take it out on? Well, you take it out on your family, on your spouse, on your boyfriend or girlfriend. And I can see not just increases in abuse. People will be drinking more and so on. After Sept. 11, we probably had the quietest weekend in Wisconsin’s history in terms of alcohol, but by Halloween detox was back to normal. I see from the paper that it was full up by midnight on the weekend before Halloween.”
All in all, a pretty grim picture: increased anxiety and higher levels of stress, which many people from Wisconsin will deal with by drinking. McGrath urges people to recognize the root of the problem and seek help. “Isolating yourself, withdrawing from people is what tends to happen,” he says. “And that's not what you want to do. We find people feel better just being with other people in a group ”
Join together
Ann Veilleux, a local clinical social worker, is trying to provide a forum for people dealing with fears and anxiety vis-a-vis Sept. 11, anthrax and the ongoing war on terror. In recent weeks she's offered a free therapy group, “Coping in an Unstable World.” It's an offer many people have managed to refuse.
“I’ve held two sessions,” says Veilleux, a therapist with the Harmonia Center for Psychotherapy in Madison. “Never more than two people showed up at any time. But I’ll hold it again if enough people are interested. I feel that strongly about this. The increase in depression and anxiety over this has already happened. It’s skyrocketing. And normal people are having reactions to what are abnormal events, at least in this country. I wanted this group to deal with those concerns. There’s just so much fear about what’s going to happen.”
Veilleux is particularly worried about the effect of the extraordinarily violent World Trade Center attack on children and patients who have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). From her private sessions with individual patients, she’s found that children are having recurrent nightmares that suggest a profound sense of insecurity. For PTSD patients, the effects are even more profound, as they occasion the same strong feelings these patients have associated with acts of violence that have touched them directly in the past.
“The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize people,” says Veilleux. “For people who haven’t experienced anxiety and depression before, it makes us not want to go downtown. It makes us not want to be in large gatherings. For people who are already experiencing those disorders — well, it only exacerbates them.”
Feeling bad about recent events, notes Veilleux, is a reasonable and natural response: “It just means you’re a normal, thinking person.” The problem is when people “get totally swamped by it and become dysfunctional. To avoid that, people need to either come together and draw strength, or draw on the spiritual energy that they feel inside themselves, or whatever they can do, to generate some positive energy. That’s part of what I was trying to do with my group.”
If people have a strong psychic need to come together and work out their feelings about Sept. 11, why was Veilleux’s first attempt at staging “Coping in an Unstable World” something of a failure? She isn’t certain, other than to blame the meager publicity she was able to generate for the free sessions. But she remains convinced that a wide range of Madisonians — including some of her own private patients — could use such a forum to help ease their worried minds.
For now Veilleux has discontinued the group but will start it up again if enough people express interest. “I just want to offer something that can be of use in the face of all this horror,” she says. “I think this is something someone really needs to be doing. People don’t need to be alone or glorify their personal sadness. They need to come together and discuss and meditate and feel like they have a sense of community and that they’re not alone at a time like this.”
