The Sum of All Fears

Recently the news became too much for Sarah Bird’s 12-year-old son, Gabriel. He lined a closet with pillows and blankets and insisted his parents join him in his comfy new bunker. But it got stuffy in there, not to mention boring, and there were chores to do, and soon the bunker was abandoned for the routines of normal life.

It wasn’t terrorists or anthrax that spooked Gabriel. It was the tornado warning that crawled across the bottom of the TV screen, the screen that continually reports alarming messages of a different sort to the members of his household. We’re all picking over a wide selection of fears these days, and Gabriel--an angelic-looking expert at video game mayhem--chose threatening weather as his personal bte noire . To each his own.

Eight weeks after the terrorist attacks, fear in all its permutations has become another story of the day, the subtext of the CNN crawl (log on to cnn.com for the latest bulletins!), a subject to be monitored, cataloged, deconstructed. We’ve parsed fear as a Bad Thing (giving in to it means the terrorists win) and a Good Thing (not only a normal reaction to horrifying events, but a possibility for finding more meaning in our shallow lives). It instructs us in old history lessons (remember how wartime hysteria shredded civil liberties and put Japanese Americans in internment camps?) and new realities (the terror is not going away, so get used to it). We’ve all become experts on fear. And for some, that status is not so new.

“This whole emotional landscape is so familiar, it’s like coming home,” says Bird, a screenwriter and novelist who grew up on Strategic Air Command bases at the height of the Cold War. Her latest book, “The Yokota Officers’ Club,” is a wry coming-of-age story about an Air Force brat much like herself, whose father flew spy missions over Russia and whose large family absorbed dread, stoicism and gallows humor in its bones. Nine of the 10 flight crews in Bird’s father’s reconnaissance squadron never returned from their missions. During air raid drills at her schools, she and her classmates trooped to camouflaged bomb shelters--camouflaged because they were enemy targets.

“We were always poised right there in front of the great Soviet maw, ready to be swallowed up at any second,” says Bird from her home in a quiet oak-shaded neighborhood in Austin, Texas. “You’re scared? Of course you’re scared. But no one, in fact, cares about your feelings. You can get killed, your whole family can get killed, deal with it. You get some security, get some guards at the gate, and move forward.”

Something to Fear at Every Turn

So, move forward. Easier said than done now that big-screen horrors--hijacked planes and collapsing skyscrapers--have morphed into a creepier dread of the small elements of everyday life: toxic mail, bridges marked as targets, strangers in airports, even the sight of a plane overhead. There are too many gates and not nearly enough guards. Dan Rather’s pronouncement that “our biggest problem is not anthrax--our biggest problem is fear” seemed a reasonable, though cliched, admonition a few weeks ago. But as the news about anthrax acquired a certain ominous weight, being afraid began to seem like an appropriate response to outlandish events.

“To say that fear is unhealthy and unhelpful is like saying that poverty is bad,” wrote Jacob Weisberg in Slate, the online magazine. “No one knows that better than the poor themselves--or, in this case, the frightened. But they can’t just wish it away.” Nor can most of us retreat to our pillow-lined closets until the dark cloud passes.

What we can do “is be realistic about what the real dangers are and act accordingly,” says Barry Glassner, a USC sociologist and author of “The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.”

In terms of a real public health threat, anthrax still pales beside everyday illnesses such as chickenpox, which annually causes far more deaths in this country. But Glassner believes deeper cultural anxieties may be stoking our dread of bioterrorism.

“With tens of millions of Americans uninsured and many more concerned about the state of our public health system, it takes only a small number of anthrax cases to create a high degree of alarm,” he says.

It also takes 24-hour news channels, a cacophony of worried media voices and the incessant crawl across the bottom of the screen with the latest reports on all that’s going wrong, from the sputtering economy to misguided bombs in Afghanistan. The result, in those prone to anxiety, is what’s called an “obsessive rumination cycle” that’s difficult to break. “I’ve put some of my patients on media abstinence,” says a prominent Seattle psychiatrist. “No CNN, no reading of the news except Newsweek or Time once a week. And it’s worked.”

Rational Responses, Irrational Anxiety

The experts say that most fear is a reaction to the unknown or an inability to deal with something that’s unavoidable. The first is often an irrational response, but it can be moderated with accurate information or a better understanding of what’s being feared. The second type of fear may be quite rational--fear of further terrorist attacks could now fall in this category--because the danger is real, and preventing or controlling it may be impossible.

Anxiety, on the other hand, attaches to no real object, no clear idea of what may happen. It produces a pervasive, foggy dread that’s difficult to penetrate. Here on the West Coast, the geographic removal from Ground Zero has produced more distance from actual fear, but a heightened sense of anxiety and surrealism. In Los Angeles, there are no daily pages of obituaries, no mass memorials, no photo identification required to get home--nothing immediate, in short, to remind people of the reality of Sept. 11.

“It’s not surreal in New York,” says Julie Carlstrom, a Los Angeles family therapist who travels back and forth to Manhattan, where her husband is a documentary filmmaker. “Most New Yorkers have had to adapt to the crisis in some daily-life kind of way. There are national guardsmen in Central Park. But the people have a ‘we have to go on’ kind of spirit. In Los Angeles, they’re just kind of feeling this dread and don’t really have a sense of anything to do. Because their life wasn’t interrupted.”

“It’s been surprising to me that among my ongoing patients, there’s been relatively little impact from Sept. 11,” says Dr. David Dunner, co-director of the Center for Anxiety and Depression at the University of Washington medical school. “For the most part, we’ve not had a significant worsening of mood disorders.” The exception: people already suffering post-traumatic stress disorders, for whom the terrorists attacks triggered relapses, especially in New York. Dunner says “a lot of new cases” are expected to begin showing up in December. (Post-traumatic stress symptoms often appear after a delay of about three months.)

Meanwhile, people are comparing their own notes on fear. In a recent talk show on the subject, Seattle radio host Ross Reynolds confessed to his listeners that he’s paranoid about smallpox. A pediatrician called in to say she’s worried about doctors overprescribing Cipro. Someone raised the specter of anthrax spores being released on an airplane--and a few days later, two flights were grounded by anthrax hoaxes.

One caller was freaked by vigilantes buying guns; another by unpatriotic peaceniks. An anxious fellow had hoped his high-speed Internet connection would make him less nervous, but now he’s finding out things he’d rather not know. “What I’ve come up with as a way of dealing with all this is denial,” a guy named Richard offered helpfully.

Carlstrom reports an unusual reaction among her patients: They’re bored. “They’re bored because they’re feeling boxed in. They’re feeling conservative about money, conservative about travel, conservative about safety--basically everybody’s kind of hunkered down, and there’s not a lot to do when you’re hunkered down.” The boredom, she says, will pass, but the reality of toughening up for the long haul will not.

“In a crisis, you go on adrenalin, you stop your normal life, you see the light at the end of the tunnel, everybody throws their full effort behind making it through. If something’s going to go on for two, three, whatever years, you can’t operate that way. You have to think of this as a marathon instead of a sprint. You have to compromise your life long-term, and it takes two to six months to adjust to that. We’re just getting started.”

One Day That Will Frame Whatever Is to Come

As our vision of a softer, less problematic world recedes rapidly in the rearview mirror, a certain clarity is emerging about what lies ahead, and what it will take to get through it. “Every American old enough to have been aware of what happened on Sept. 11 will remember that event as long as he or she lives,” says Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley. “Nowhere in our history--that is, the history of the United States--can we find a moment of horror as terrible as this moment has been. That horror, it seems to me, will introduce into our culture an element that has been missing in recent decades.

“That element is fear. All of us and our children will now move ahead into this uncertain future ... a future in which in some corner of our minds we will always carry with us the possibility that everything can change in the blink of an eye.”

It’s a kind of acceptance Bird, the novelist, knows well. “What’s really great about the military brat mentality,” she says, “is that that’s a given. That’s part of what you sign up for, that you can die, and so what? You still complete the mission. It sounds really harsh. It’s the other end of the pendulum that I guess we’re revisiting after years of cherishing every little hurt, every little anxiety, every little thing Mom and Dad did, every little slight from your boss, every little bump in the road of your relationship. We’re all brats now.”