-Caveat Lector- From http://www.sunday- times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/10/21/stiusausa02003.html
}}}>Begin October 21 2001 TERRORISM A new generation is getting used to the idea that the planet is not a safe place. It never was, writes Bryan Appleyard It's the end of the world . . . again 'Inhale and exhale," advises Gary Stollak, professor of psychology at Michigan State University, "and hold each other's hands." Norine G Johnson, president of the American Psychological Association, says: "We are using our scientific knowledge and our therapeutic expertise to help the nation through this time of trauma and terror. This is trauma on a level never experienced in this country." Meanwhile, the University of California at Los Angeles has created 50 new undergraduate courses since September 11 to "explore the scope of issues emerging from the terrorist attacks". These new courses include Navigating between Blithesome Optimism and Cultural Despair, Women's Participation in Political Violence and the Zen-like Understanding the Unthinkable and the Incomprehensible. What Americans do best is domesticate things. That is what is happening here. An unprecedented assault on mainland America is being turned into sentimental psychobabble, an occasion for nationwide counselling or politically correct pseudo-courses. Daft as these things are, they are like tea and crumpets to the Americans - they exude the cosy glow of home. But, this time, it doesn't work. Something huge is missing. These mandarins of calm and counselling sound as desperate and misguided as those people who have been buying gas masks, bio-hazard suits and anti-anxiety drugs. Beneath their words is the fear that everything they have thought or taught for the past 12 years is now meaningless. The cold war ended in 1989 and, with it, the immediate likelihood of global nuclear conflict. Certainly the spectre of an environmental apocalypse haunted the 1990s but, compared with nuclear winter, it seemed remote. Abo ve all, it seemed fixable. When the time came we could just switch to electric cars, solar power or whatever the scientists were going to dream up for us. Similarly, the local conflicts of those years - the Balkans, Ulster, the Middle East - seemed fixable once enough heads had been banged together. Nothing more accurately captured this attitude than Bill Clinton's remark - which he later had to withdraw - that dealing with Ulster was like handling a fight in a pub . It was a stupid, local row among people who just weren't American enough. Furthermore, if any of those problems really were intractable, then there was always the safety of isolation in Fortress America. There the people could console themselves with violent Hollywood fantasies that were invari ably resolved by a home-grown superhero. Not any more. "Superman or Bruce Willis aren't going to turn up and sort this one out," observes Peter Wilson, director of the children's mental health charity, Young Minds. "People have been living an unreal life among ever more viole nt images of frenzy and terror. This is for real and it breaks through the strange veneer that has separated people from reality." Wilson has been thinking about how children deal with this. Children, of course, add poignancy to the equation, but they also increase our sense of helplessness. What do we tell them? And what, most appallingly, do we tel l them about the 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds bearing Kalashnikovs and yelling their allegiance to the cause of killing the infidels? We tell them, says Wilson, our truth. It's all we have. But, of course, it's not just about children. "Children are pretty much the same as all of us," Wilson points out. "We are all in this pickle together." And it's not just about Americans; we were all lulled by the apocaly pse-free, economically buoyant 1990s. Suddenly the 1990s seem like what W H Auden called the 1930s as the world descended into war - "a low, dishonest decade". For those of us who remember the slow, livid days and the sweaty, dream-laden nights of the Cuban missile crisis, the proximity of the end of the world may be familiar. But, for anybody under 40, this really is a new way of life. Suddenly the world in every aspect, however banal, is loaded with ominous portent. The morning post may bear disease; inside that plane dipping into Heathrow may be a hell of cut-throats and screaming fanatics. "Everybody is in a state of hyper-vigilance or hyper-awareness and things that people ordinarily wouldn't look at are looking strange," says Harvey Schlossberg, professor of criminal justice and psychology at New York's S t John's University. © A new armageddon: once our worst fears centred on a nuclear winter, now we see apocalypse in an aircraft or a child with a gun. Photograph: Zia Mazhar/Force Photo/Retuers Once, some years ago in Tel Aviv, I was told, authoritatively, to get out of town. A terrorist group had got hold of a nuke and it was targeted at the city. I had every reason to believe the threat was genuine. The street s and shops became unreal, the people spectral, as if dead already. A total threat changes everything. But it's not just about terrorism. Some corner has been turned in the human imagination. Apocalypses, like buses and bananas, tend to come in bunches. Now we have Stephen Hawking warning us in his new book, The Universe i n a Nutshell, that novel, artificial bugs could destroy the species. Hawking also says we had better start bio-engineering our brains before demonically smart machines take over. Hawking must have written his book long be fore September 11, but some malign synchronicity is now at work in the world. Try averting your gaze. You can't. Every casual chat now veers into apocalyptic speculation. What will happen in Saudi Arabia, Kashmir? Will India or Pakistan unleash a nuclear weapon? What else have the terrorists got in store? And, even when you stop talking, the images persist. "Childhood has vanished," says Wilson, "we can't close their eyes to this. It all happened on television. It happened in the middle of the day and was replayed constantly. They can't help but see it. They are as exposed as we are. Their gut feelings are the same - terror, fear, anger, helplessness, despair, fury, maybe guilt. We can't make it better - we must tell them whatever it is we think." During the missile crisis I was appalled by the silence of the adults. Did they not know? But this time nobody is silent. Everybody talks about it all the time and the "it" is vast, indefinable, terminal. But there is one consolation, though you may think it doesn't amount to much. Everything the human species has ever done was achieved in the shadow of the apocalypse. For the truth is that the period between the end of the cold war and the beginning of global terror was, in historical terms, an aberration. Humans have always lived in close proximity to the end of the world, real or imagined. Even before nuclear weapons, there was the widespread belief that aerial bombardment would signal the end of civilisation. Before the advent of modern scepticism, it was commonplace to believe that the book of Revelation could start to happen at any moment. Bubonic plague - at least in its non-bio-engineered form - can now be cured by antibiotics, but not long ago it could rage unchecked through whole populations. And so on. Wealth, peace and secularism have, for a few brief years, concealed from us the customary presence of the abyss. But now it is back in full view. So the hard message is: the apocalypse? Business as usual. Deal with it. Or, more tenderly, there are the words of Wilson, a good man who fights to keep children sane: "We must stay together and love each other and see what happens." Next page: Andrew Sullivan Next: Andrew Sullivan Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. 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