The Shock Of 9/11
Henry here. The attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 forces itself into the center of our attention at this time of the year. The attack started what the Bush administration calls “The War On Terror”. The disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq followed.
One image that stands out for me about that day is the one where President Bush was doing a PR bit, reading to elementary children. An aid came to tell him that the Twin Towers were being attacked and he sat there doing nothing for an incredibly, embarrassingly long time.
I have never heard a helpful explanation of what was going on during that time. One commentator said that he is so much without focus and understanding that he was paralyzed when there was not an aid there to tell him what to do an to say.
Such criticism seems exceedingly sharp. Perhaps there is a much better explanation but I haven’t heard anything, which explained that incredibly long pause when all his processes seemed to have stopped. Perhaps we will never know what was happening, but I do know what happens to many people when they are precipitated into a crisis.
Many years ago, for my first master’s degree, I wrote a thesis on “Ministering to Persons in crisis.” We tend to respond to crisis in predictable ways. The first pretty much universal stage to most crisis is shock.
Depending on the nature of the crisis, when we experience shock we experience enormous stress. We tend to experience shock as a profound threat to our existing structures. Military personnel and emergency workers are trained to act in emergencies to get past this shock reaction and to deal with the situation.
People’s emotional experience during this time is often a sense of panic, massive anxiety and helplessness. One woman reported in a group that she watched her child almost drown but she could not force herself to move and to act. She knew perfectly well that her child was going to drown but was immobilized. Luckily someone else stepped in and saved the toddlers life. Many people, to their dismay, discover this about themselves, that they are capable of being immobilized by fear.
In the next post I will talk a bit more about shock and President Bush.