Living With a 9/11 State of Mind

Maria Erspamer loaded the big white rental truck with her belongings, stowed her cats, Pumpkin and Foxy, and slid onto the passenger seat next to an old friend. Then they headed east on the Santa Monica Freeway.

Los Angeles was soon in the rearview mirror. Erspamer felt giddy. She had liked being a free-lance advertising writer and novice surfer, liked her funky digs three blocks from the ocean in Venice, liked her clever, irony-armored entertainment industry friends.

Yet something was lacking, and Erspamer, single and 30, was hardly aware of it until Sept. 11. Now, 2 1/2 months later, she was going home.

“My priorities changed after the tragedy,” she said. “Before, I was more concerned with myself and my career. After, I couldn’t see anything more important than being with my family.”

Her decision to return to Phoenix and reunite with her two brothers, mother and father, who is in his 80s and has prostate cancer, grew out of “a hole in my sense of security and in my trust of what will happen in the future,” she said.

That sense of vulnerability may be the most important emotional legacy of the terrorist attacks.

The unease surfaced immediately after 9/11 in a burst of praying, volunteering, blood-giving and flag-waving. Sales of guns, Bibles, self-help manuals and anti-anxiety medications surged. Many people felt depressed. Some avoided flying; others, skyscrapers. A number of New York City and Washington, D.C., residents left for what they believed would be safer ground in smaller cities or rural towns.

But the legions of social scientists, folklorists and others probing Americans’ varied responses to the attacks have also found a rise in teamwork and gratitude, an easing of cynicism, and an unusually high level of trust among Americans across racial and ethnic lines--a finding that appears to belie predictions that the attacks would breed intolerance.

Five months later, the question is whether any of those responses will persist long enough to leave a mark on the national character, much as the Depression bred a new frugality and wariness and World War II inspired a renewal of civic spirit.

Some scholars speculate that 9/11 won’t change Americans in the long run unless additional terrorist attacks revive the original fear and anxiety.

“Trauma, whatever its intensity, has a major impact on one’s life only if there are reminders of it,” said Shlomo Breznitz, a psychologist at the University of Haifa in Israel and an authority on living amid violent conflict. “And for this, it’s too soon to tell.”

Robert Putnam, a Harvard University social historian, said the increase in trust and generosity among Americans probably won’t last unless the government and private organizations reinforce it with new or expanded civic responsibilities and volunteer opportunities.

President Bush sought to do just that in his State of the Union address, proposing a major expansion of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps and other volunteer service programs.

What made Pearl Harbor such a galvanizing event, Putnam said, were the rubber and scrap metal drives, the victory gardens and war bonds that harnessed people’s natural inclination to pitch in.

“Leaving aside the possibility of some new trauma,” he said, “if we don’t do something affirmatively to keep this mood alive by institutionalizing it, I think it will disappear.”

Yet the events of September by themselves show signs of influencing a great many lives. By destroying a shared and cherished belief in the nation’s unassailability, the tragedy may engender ways of thinking and behaving that will be recognizable one day as rooted in 9/11.

“There’s no going back to normal,” said Mel Cummings, 50, an assistant architect in Brooklyn. “We’ll always have this in the back of our mind, always be edgy over what can happen in a split second. You’re not in control of your destiny. When thousands die instantly like that, it brings that point right to the surface.”

Americans Reexamine Their Priorities

David Spiegel, a Stanford University psychiatrist, has gathered information from more than 7,000 people responding to an Internet questionnaire about the effects of the attacks. The responses, he said, make clear that many people are reexamining priorities.

“What were we, as a nation, preoccupied with before 9/11?” Spiegel asked. “Mostly making money and the sex life of the former president. Now both of those things seem trivial.”

A hallmark of the crisis is how it has prompted people such as Maria Erspamer to redirect themselves. In a Los Angeles Times survey of 1,995 adults in mid-November, about 25% said the disaster was transforming their lives for the better. They reported spending more time with family members, expressing patriotic feelings and having a clearer sense of what matters most.

After leaving L.A. and rumbling 370 miles along Interstate 10, Erspamer arrived in Phoenix late at night. The next day was Thanksgiving--an apt beginning, she said, for a family reunion.

She had lived in L.A. seven years. She’d been thinking about leaving ever since her father’s cancer was diagnosed last spring. The attacks crystallized that longing.

Erspamer has a new job in Phoenix. She misses her L.A. friends, she said, but has no regrets.

“You never know how much time you have. That was the most significant thing I took away from Sept. 11. I want to make the most of every day, and it’s not enough to fly home to my family every few months. I want to be with them and share their daily experience.”

Today, Americans’ anxiety may not be as acute as it was five months ago, but specialists in risk analysis say that worry about possible future attacks will persist and will continue to cause stress-related problems.

“That a few determined people could produce such massive harm and destruction on a great nation such as ours was very unsettling,” said Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon.

A fear that can be pictured, like the TV images of the jets crashing into the World Trade Center and the buildings collapsing, is generally more powerful than one that can’t be, he said. Adding to the anxiety, he said, is the enemies’ elusiveness and the possibility of more attacks.

Since 9/11, Americans have been improvising ways to reduce the odds of becoming victims, from shunning crowds to washing their hands after opening the mail.

Whether or not such measures are truly protective, it’s important for individuals to do something, if only to avoid feeling helpless, said Jerilyn Ross, president of the Anxiety Disorders Assn. of America.

Angela Hill, a 24-year-old Web site developer in Missoula, Mont., had looked forward to moving to San Francisco. She was driving there Sept. 11. On hearing the news about the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, she turned back.

“It didn’t seem like a great idea to move to a major metropolitan area right then,” she said.

Tracy Chastain, a 40-year-old mother of three in Athens, Ala., has stocked up on food and forbidden her teenage daughter to hang around a nearby mall, which she vaguely worries is a possible terrorist target.

Chastain said that is not the only way the attacks have affected her.

“I guess every generation has an event that changes it, like the Depression was for my grandparents,” she said. “I am not the same person I was before Sept. 11. I think I’ll be more cautious and have more of a global view. Before, I didn’t think much about what was happening in other parts of the world.”

Written Tributes Show a Remarkable Unity

Written tributes left around New York City after Sept. 11 expressed grief, rage and a desire for revenge. But mostly, said folklorist Steve Zeitlin, who has been documenting 9/11 artifacts, they voiced a remarkable unity.

An anonymous poem at one shrine said in part:

As the soot and ash rained down,

We became one color.

As we carried each other down the stairs of the burning building,

We became one class.

As we lit candles of waiting and hope,

We became one generation.

Evidence abounds of an outpouring of fellow-feeling not seen in this nation for decades. In an unintended experiment, psychologists Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania and Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan showed that several virtues bloomed after the disaster.

In June, they posted on the Web (at https://www.positivepsychology.org) a questionnaire that seeks to measure 24 character strengths, such as curiosity, fairness, forgiveness and love of learning. It was part of an effort by the two psychologists to focus their profession on virtues as well as pathologies. Anyone age 18 or older was invited to respond to the 316 questions about personal outlook, habits and preferences.

Before Sept. 11, more than 450 people filled out the questionnaire; since then, more than 600 have done so.

After the attacks, the responses showed people placing a greater value on six qualities: love, gratitude, hope, kindness, spirituality and teamwork.

“In a nutshell, everything that has to do with relating to other people went up,” Peterson said. Women usually place more value than men on “interpersonal strengths,” he said, but after Sept. 11, men were responsible for the new emphasis on these qualities.

Yet, by mid-December, test results showed the enthusiasm for those values starting to wane. Peterson said it was not clear yet whether the virtue index would drop to pre-9/11 levels.

The sudden, perhaps transitory, outpouring of benevolence, Peterson said, is consistent with what happens when people are suddenly forced to confront a certainty we would sooner forget: We too shall die.

In recent years, researchers specializing in “terror management,” or how people handle the fear of death, have done experiments showing that sudden thoughts of mortality stimulate patriotic impulses, strengthen support for mainstream values and spur a search for meaning.

“When people are reminded of death, it increases their need to share in the values of their culture,” said psychologist Thomas Pyszczynski, co-author of a forthcoming book titled “In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror in the 21st Century.”

But he doubts that this response will be long-lived.

“My hunch is it’s doing those things in the short term,” he said. “It will have that effect until people start forgetting about the attacks and the threat . . . and go about their daily lives.”

The Times poll reinforces his hunch. In November, 13% of respondents said they were more involved in their community than before the attacks, but that was down from a post-disaster peak of 20%. The poll’s margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.

Likewise, church attendance has slipped since the weeks immediately after Sept. 11, when people packed houses of worship and public memorial services. Religious leaders predicted a great revival, but polls have found that the proportion of people who say they attend religious services every week has returned to previous levels, about 40%.

Mark Granovetter, a sociologist at Stanford, said the terrorist attacks may fail to cause a lasting boost in civic engagement because there’s no issue to rally people.

It’s not like feminism or civil rights or the Vietnam War, he said, adding: “I don’t see any social movements arising out of 9/11.”

Goodwill Often Surges After a Disaster

The experience of people in other countries who live amid violent conflict may shed some light on what Americans have been going through.

Breznitz, the Israeli psychologist, said feelings of goodwill often intensify after a disaster, when differences between rich and poor and black and white are suddenly not important. Research shows that such feelings are temporary unless violence occurs again, he said. The new sense of purpose is overwhelmed by “routine and habit, which are very powerful.”

Still, people have been inspired by 9/11 to break out of old habits. Indeed, implicit in many reflections on the catastrophe is the realization of shortcomings in American life.

Verna Kay, 54, a retired paralegal in Parkston, S.D., said she started volunteering at her local Roman Catholic parish after the attacks, serving meals and washing dishes. She’d always been spiritual, she said, “but it didn’t manifest it in a community way. It was more of a private thing. But after Sept. 11, I don’t think contemplative prayer is enough.

“Everyone’s kind of reevaluating,” she said. “There’s always this constant pressure to focus on work to the detriment of family life . . . on getting things rather than appreciating that we’re living.”

Philip Hall, 41, of Denton, Texas, said he now reads to his two children at night.

“We used to spend a lot of time watching TV and not really interacting,” said the producer of educational videos. “I believe it’s drawn us together. . . . My oldest boy confides in me more often.”

Rita Russell, 53, of Cherokee, Okla., said she joined her husband and three grown children in October for five days of deer hunting. They stayed in an old camper that her husband bought and fixed up for the occasion. They talked and talked. They’d never done anything like it.

“As far as the getting together [is concerned], I think we’re going to do more of that,” she said. “It makes you realize you better do it today, because there might not be tomorrow.”

For decades, ambitious Americans have barely hesitated to put 3,000 miles between themselves and their families, on the assumption that no place is more than a six-hour flight away. But now some are recalculating the distance.

Corporate recruiters have noted a rise in the number of top executives looking to return to their hometowns or searching for jobs requiring less travel, according to headhunter Jeffrey Clark, a recruiter in the Newport Beach office of Kenneth Clark International. A number of clients, he said, “have a newfound sense of wanting to be close to family structures.”

At Brentwood High School in St. Louis, Aisha Hossin, a 17-year-old senior, had long wanted to study dance at the North Carolina School of the Arts. But her mother vetoed the idea.

“My mom really wants to keep me in state, and I’m starting to agree.” Now her top college choice is just a two-hour drive from home.

Classmate Julia Schumacher, also 17, is abandoning hope of spending some of her college years in Europe.

“My family, we’re big overseas people,” she said, recalling her parents’ years as missionaries in Botswana. “But it makes me nervous to think about what’s going on.”

‘This Has Brought Us Together’

On Sept. 11, Adriana DiFranco, 33, and Todd Pfeiffer, 32, were honeymooning in Arizona. When they returned home to Washington, D.C., it shook them to see National Guard troops in the streets, police everywhere and postal workers wearing rubber gloves.

They’d talked before of simplifying their lives, of moving to a smaller, slower, less expensive place. The attacks, DiFranco said, “put an exclamation point on that idea.”

In late November, they vacated their apartment, stored their belongings and hit the road in their orange 1974 Volkswagen bus. Now they’re touring the East, visiting friends and family.

“I’ve taken my family for granted in the past,” Pfeiffer said. “This has brought us together.”

She’s in marketing, most recently at a dot-com firm, and he’s a business consultant who would rather be a furniture maker. Maybe they’ll settle in North Carolina or Florida, she said.

You could think of them as dropouts, or you could think of them as a new kind of patriot, goaded by the attacks to live life to the fullest. Their VW bus, that old anti-establishment symbol, sports a “Powered by Love” sticker on the rear bumper. In the windshield is an American flag.

“We have it good in this country,” Pfeiffer said. “When something like this happens, it makes you think.”

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Times staff writers Stephanie Simon in St. Louis and Teresa Watanabe in Los Angeles and Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.