Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

The Onion, if you're not familiar, is a "news" outlet that puts out a printed newspaper, a TV show and a website absolutely chock full of fake news. Typical headlines are things like, "Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions" and "Syracuse Leaves Big East For Woman Named 'Misti'." The Onion, in my humble opinion, varies between mildly amusing and downright hilarious, and occasionally it hits the nail on the head with its headlines in ways that make you say, "What's sad is, that's almost true."

From time to time, the Onion gets in trouble because someone doesn't realize they're kidding. There is, in fact, an entire blog devoted to people taking the Onion literally on Facebook, often with hilarious results. Many years ago, when the Onion published a story saying that Congress was threatening to leave Washington unless they got a new Capitol building with sky boxes, it got picked up by the official media in China and reported as factual evidence of the failures of capitalism.

Today there was another such Onion incident. The Onion ran an article on its website with the headline, "Congress Takes Group of Schoolchildren Hostage." The tagline was, "'We need $12 trillion or all these kids die.'" This was accompanied by a doctored photo of John Boehner with a gun to the head of a little girl.

The Onion then began sending tweets, the first of which read, "BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building." This got retweeted enough times and alarmed enough people that the phones at the Capitol Police Department started ringing off the hook. They actually began an investigation, because by this point, although they knew the story was false, they couldn't figure out where it had started.

So the question is, is this just another case of people not getting an Onion joke, or did the Onion actually do something wrong here? I think it's the latter, but apparently for a different reason than most commentators out there.

My take is this: the Onion is funny because they manage to run stories that relate to reality in some way but are just off the wall enough that if you're paying attention you know they can't be true. In this instance, the notion that Congress is "holding the country hostage" is not a new one, but no one really thinking about it would believe that John Boehner actually was threatening little children with a firearm. You may or may not like the politics of this story, and you may or may not think it was funny, but it was clearly intended as a joke. Most of the comments out there about this mess suggest that such a story by itself, or with the picture, crosses the line of decency. I actually think that is not the problem

The problem is that, when the Onion started tweeting, they did something crucially different than what they did in the original story. That first tweet had absolutely nothing in it that would even hint that it was supposed to be a joke. There wasn't anything about how Congress, as a whole, was taking hostages. That's the part we knew was false. All it said was that there was gunfire and screams at the Capitol. That was purely believable, and because of that it wasn't funny.


You might argue that anyone who knows anything about the Onion should have known it wasn't true anyway, and you would have a point. However, not everyone knows the Onion, and once people started retweeting and the original author was lost in the stream, people seeing this tweet had no way to know that it wasn't real. The Onion lost control of the joke. In hindsight, at least, that seems pretty predictable.


The Onion's sin here wasn't making fun of violence at the Capitol. It was joking in a way that did not insure that everyone would at least have a chance to be in on the joke. I hope the folks over at the Onion learned a lesson, because I'd hate to feel like I can't read it anymore. It's pretty funny.

This post was updated on September 30 at 11:09 PM.

Last week, a man walked into the lobby of the Discovery Channel building in Silver Spring, Maryland and took three people hostage.  He was heavily armed and had what appeared to be explosives strapped to him.  The building was locked down and then evacuated.  When the incident was over, the hostages were unharmed and the perpetrator was dead, shot by a law enforcement sniper.

So, imagine you're at work and a man with a gun and explosives comes in, yells a lot, tells people not to move, and you run.  You call 911, from inside the building or from outside.  What do you imagine you would say, and what would you sound like saying it?  I'm not asking what you should say, or how you should act, but how do you imagine you would actually behave?  I know I've had to call 911 for much less serious situations which were much less threatening to me personally, and while I say what needs to be said I am pretty agitated and upset. 

Over the weekend, the 911 tapes from the Discovery Channel incident were released.  Clips were played on various television news broadcasts, and summaries were printed in the press.  What is truly remarkable to me in listening to these is that the callers uniformly sound calm and are able to give extremely detailed descriptions of what is going on, what the man has in terms of weaponry, and how he acted when he entered the building.  No one is crying.  No one is screaming.  No one is yelling for police to hurry.  They say what needs to be said, they appear to be very accurate, and they remain calm.

To what can we attribute this calm and accuracy on the part of people who had just narrowly escaped being killed?  There are probably a number of things at work here.  First of all, the man who was responsible for this was a known quantity.  He had been arrested outside the building before and, until two weeks before, was under a court order to stay away.  His picture was posted around the building as someone to look out for.  This means that when people called 911 and described him, they weren't only working from what they had just seen, but also from pictures they had seen and information stored in their long-term memory.

Having pictures of this man posted around the office also served another purpose.  On some level, everyone who worked at the Discovery Channel and saw those pictures had considered the possibility that something like this might happen some day.  They may not have believed it, and they may not have imagined the specific details, but the thought that this man was dangerous and could harm them had already crossed their mind.  When it actually happened, they didn't have to process something brand new.  Instead of thinking, "Something horrible is happening and I don't know what to do with it," they could think, "The horrible thing that I feared is happening."  That left more brain power available to notice the details.

My daughter also points out another important fact*.  When we're scared, our senses are heightened and our memory for what we perceive is also heightened.  This can turn out not to be very helpful, because we often remember the wrong things.  In this case, however, it seems that people remembered the right things.

Finally, it's important to note that feeling out of control and acting out of control are not the same thing.  We can imagine that, under these circumstances, we'd be scared out of our minds.  And certainly being scared out of our minds can affect how we act.  But people often experience a remarkable ability to do what needs to be done in an emergency, and fall apart later.  Bravery does not mean not being scared.  It means doing what you need to do even though you're scared.  I think we can all agree, there are a lot of brave people over at the Discovery Channel.

* You know you're bringing your work home when your 12-year-old child can analyze a crisis situation and come up with insightful commentary!

Ross Douthat at the New York Times had an excellent piece yesterday about what we should -- and should not -- draw from the politics of the perpetrator in this incident.  I highly recommend it.

A man in a wheelchair is, as I write this, holding at least 5 people hostage in the Wytheville, Virginia Post Office.  We know he has a gun, and he has what he claims is 5 pounds of C-4 explosive strapped to his chest.  The only demand he has made thus far, at least as far as police have reported, is for pizza.

This story especially caught my eye because I have been joking around all afternoon, giving people my latest "hot tip" -- on December 23, do not attempt to mail a package at the Inman Square Post Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  As you might guess, I myself attempted this feat this morning.  The post office in question is very small, and it was very busy this morning, as were, probably, most post offices in the United States, including the one in Wytheville.

Wytheville has a population of just 8,500 people.  This is not a bustling metropolis, nor is it a place anyone would pick as a high profile terrorist target.  I bring this up, because most of us, rightly or wrongly, have an idea in the back of our minds that, because terrorists with major government agendas tend to pick very public, large places to attack, that no one ever attacks small towns. 

This is, if you think about it, obviously false.  While it may be true that people with grandiose agendas pick places like the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City Federal Building, Fort Hood, or even the Holocaust Museum, there are numerous examples of people with smaller agendas, or just pure mental illness and no agenda at all, who strike in much more random places.  Those places are often small.

I often write about how trauma affects us, even from a distance, because we can make a personal connection to something about the event.  Certain types of incidents, locations, motives, or any number of factors that can make us identify just that little bit more it takes to go from thinking an event is horrible to really taking it personally.  For me, today, it is knowing that I mailed a package in a crowded post office today, and knowing that it is just random chance that there wasn't a gunman in a wheelchair with explosives coming after me.

On July 28, 2006, a man took held a teenage girl at gunpoint, forced his way into the Seattle Jewish Federation offices and started shooting.  One woman was killed and five others were injured.  The gunman, who had a history of mental illness, told a dispatcher he was tired of Jews, Israel and American foreign policy, and he was hoping to get on CNN.  Today, a jury rejected his insanity defense and found him guilty at his second trial (the first one ended in a hung jury).

This was not the first shooting at a place associated with Judaism in the United States, and it was not the last.  Over the last 15 years or so, security has been increasing steadily at synagogues, community centers and museums.  Here in Ann Arbor, you have to show picture ID to get into the Jewish Community Center.  Many synagogues have police presence during holiday services.

All of us who frequent Jewish community buildings know why the extra security is there.  At the same time, we don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about it.  We tell ourselves that it's to guard against something that, realistically, isn't going to happen anyway.  We know there are those "out there" who, because of ignorance or illness, think that shooting at Jews is a good thing to do.  We just don't think they are anywhere near us.

I remember distinctly how I felt when I heard about the shooting in Seattle.  My family lived in Seattle for four months about ten years ago, and we've visited several times, so I felt some connection.  More than that, however, I remember imagining very vividly what the scene must have looked like.  I placed the shooting in my mind at building that looked just like the local JCC.  I could very much picture what happened and where it happened, even though I'd never been there and the building in Seattle probably looks nothing like this.

This is what having a personal connection to a traumatic event does to us.  While everyone who heard about this event knew it was terrible, those of us with ties to the Jewish community had much easier access to the details of what made it awful.  Anyone can, if they try, put themselves in a traumatic scene in their mind's eye.  We just got there much more easily.

I was therefore somewhat surprised when I read about the verdict in this case.  I wasn't surprised that the jury found the gunman guilty, although I don't have enough of the details to have an opinion about whether he was legally insane or not.  What surprised me was that, before I read about the verdict, I had totally forgotten about this incident.  Part of what allows me to go to my Temple on a regular basis is the ability to not vividly imagine an actual shooting when I do, and so my mind has given itself permission to file this away until needed.

Nevertheless, when I heard about the verdict, I immediately saw that same scene that I had imagined 3 years ago in my mind.  For me, that is what represents the trauma of this shooting.  Oddly, I have a vivid visual memory of something that I never saw.  In a few days or weeks, the Seattle shooting will be filed away again.  Soon enough, I and many other people, will convince ourselves that we are guarding against something that, realistically, isn't going to happen anyway.  Until the next time.

Note: The picture above is of Pam Waechter, the director of the Seattle Jewish Federation's annual campaign, who was killed in the shooting.  Ms. Waechter was a Jew by choice, having been raised Lutheran.  As Richard Silverstein wrote at the time,

It is terribly ironic that a woman who elects to convert to Judaism in order to share the joy and fate of the Jewish people should pay the ultimate price for that commitment.

May her memory be a blessing.

This morning, a man walked into Stissing Mountain Middle School in Pine Plains, New York, assembled a gun in the bathroom, and took my colleague, Principal Bob Hess, hostage. The standoff lasted two hours before the suspect surrendered, releasing Mr. Hess. The entire bulding locked down for those two hours, with children hiding in locked classrooms, the school kitchen and even under the desk in the counseling office right next door to where the gunman was.

The fact is, we all know it's a possibility. Any school Principal who has given any detailed thought to an armed intruder coming into the school has already realized that the most likely target is the Principal. An angry parent, a custody dispute that we intervene in, a trespasser we ask to leave, or a disturbed child, if they took out a gun, could all very well be aiming it at us. In places where, as in Michigan, we practice locking down the school, we practice it with the administrator directing the rest of the staff and taking the lead. We try not to think about the possibility that we would be shot or held hostage ourselves.

Counseling will now be offered to the students, staff and families at Stissing Mountain. In the official curriculum I teach on Critical Incident Stress Management, they say that peers may not be necessary in delivering CISM services to schools. If there's anyone from Pine Plains out there listening, I want you to know that I think a peer is absolutely critical in assisting Mr. Hess.

If this were me, I would not want to talk to a counselor or a social worker or a psychologist. I would want to talk to someone else who has lived with the knowledge they walk around with a big target on their head every day. I would want my person to understand that in an emergency I take pride in being able to keep everyone calm and safe, and who can imagine that being the one person least able to do anything in this situation was horrible. I would want someone who has had their own child in the building when something bad happened, and had to worry about the group, not the individual. I would want someone who knew the significance of having something happen "on your watch." I would want to talk to a really well trained Principal.

I hope they have one in Pine Plains. And Principal Hess, I'm glad you're safe.