Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

For the last six days, the man responsible for the bombing and mass shooting that killed 77 people in Norway last July has been testifying at his trial. He admits that he was the person who carried out the attacks -- there is no question or controversy about that. This trial is being held to determine whether what he did was a crime and, if so, whether he was sane at the time he committed it.

The shooter's view is that this was not a crime. He has an elaborate and fairly paranoid political ideology which, he believes, justifies the attacks as part of a war against Muslims and multiculturalism. Since he was defending his people, he claims, this was not a crime. As far as I can tell, no one expects this argument to win the case.

The question of whether he is -- or was at the time of the attack -- sane is somewhat more complicated. There are two psychiatric reports in play. One says that the shooter has paranoid schizophrenia and was unaware of reality when he committed the crime. The other says that he is a narcissist, but he knew what he was doing and is responsible for his actions. The shooter, for his part, says he is sane.

This case points out some of the big problems with legal discussions of sanity. "Insanity" is a legal term, not a medical or psychiatric one. There are millions of people in the world at this very moment who have a disorder that is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) right along with paranoid schizophrenia, and they are legally sane. That is, they know right from wrong and can appreciate the consequences of their actions. In fact, there are millions of legally sane people with paranoid schizophrenia.

In fact, one of the mental disorders listed in the DSM is narcissistic personality disorder. In other words, both psychiatrists who have evaluated this man think he has a disorder. What they disagree about is which one, what type (personality disorders are considered to be in a different group or "Axis" from other mental disorders) and whether it impacted his ability to know right from wrong. (In another high profile case, the man who kidnapped and repeatedly raped Elizabeth Smart was found legally sane in part on the basis of a report that said he had narcissistic personality disorder as well.)

On an intuitive level, most of us have a sense that you can't be all there and do what this man did. You'd have to be "sick" or "crazy." But those aren't medical terms either. And obviously your view of right and wrong has to be pretty messed up to think this is OK. But most people who commit murder are legally sane, and most legally insane people don't commit murder.

Where is the line between wrong or bad or evil and insane? Where do messed up values and priorities cross the line into not responsible for your actions? I think that's a question that doesn't have an answer. We have legal standards, and we hope we'll know the difference when we see it.

In my next post, I'll take a look at the impact of the trial on the families of those who died. Stay tuned.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a protester at Occupy Maine, the Portland, ME off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street protests. In the interest of economic equality, you have been camping in Lincoln Park in Portland for a few weeks. There aren't many of you, but you're committed. And while not everyone agrees with you, those who don't tend to brand you as harmless loons. Not a compliment, certainly, but if you can stand Portland nights in October you can stand a little ridicule.

Then, early one Sunday morning, someone tries to kill you. Maybe that's actually their intent, or maybe they think they're being funny or its a "prank," but they throw a chemical explosive device out of a passing car into the tent next to yours. You awaken to an explosion. You realize that if they had aimed a little bit to the side you would be maimed or dead right now. You're shaken. You're scared. Sleep isn't going to come easily the next night, or for a few nights. The police come, but have no real leads.

To you, this is a turning point, not just for you but for the Occupy protests. Now it's not just us vs. the banks, or even us vs. the police. Someone out there hates the Occupy movement enough to want people dead. You wait to see what the reaction will be. Will the anti-Occupy folks denounce this act of violence? Will it galvanize support for the movement or cause others to think twice about participating? Is this the first of a rash of similar incidents or an isolated problem? You wait to see what the press will say.

Nothing.

The sum total of press coverage of this attack in the first 24 hours is 148 words in the Portland Press Herald. Not only is there no national coverage, there isn't even any coverage in other parts of Maine. You're pretty sure that if this had happened while you were just out camping in the park for fun, or if it had happened at your house, it would be big news. But you, as a protester, don't matter. Your movement doesn't matter. Your life is so insignificant that nearly losing it isn't news.

At least there isn't intrusive and inaccurate press coverage. At least the press aren't hounding you. At least no one's trying to spin it as justified.

Somehow, I doubt you feel any better.

There's an old wives' tail that goes something like this: Male mosquitoes buzz, but don't bite. Females bite, but don't buzz. So it's when you don't hear anything that you should worry.*

I was reminded of this yesterday, when news broke of the failed plot, allegedly by Iran, to recruit members of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Syrian ambassador to the United States by bombing an undetermined location in Washington, DC. The media has been making the obvious comparisons to a spy novel or Hollywood script.

The plot seems amateurish. The evil Iranians we all fear can certainly do better than this, can't they? In the Middle East, the story has been met with outright disbelief.

In the sage of another highly publicized failed plot, the "underwear bomber" pled guilty in Detroit today. Apparently what he wanted more than anything was the chance to make a public statement about why he did it, and so he did.

Both of these plots should, from one perspective, terrify me. Not only do I live in the Detroit area, I've taken Flight 253 from Amsterdam. I have family in Washington, DC. These plots represent plots against people and places I care about.

And yet, I'm not terrified. To me, these plots seem like the male mosquitoes. They're the ones that we notice, but not the ones that are dangerous. They make the noise, but they don't bite.

I'm not worried about these. If this is the best the terrorists can come up with, I think we're OK. What scares me isn't the ones we know about. It's the ones we don't. Remember, it's the silent, female mosquitoes that bite.

* Like many pieces of "common knowledge," this turns out not to be true. While it is only the females that bite, the buzz is the sound of beating wings and comes from both males and females.

So, are you feeling like dog poop yet? Sick of the coverage? Want to talk about something -- anything else? Welcome to the 10th anniversary of 9-11, and to being a human who has experienced trauma. If you didn't read what I had to say yesterday about getting through this in a healthy way, I highly suggest it -- that one was more important than what I've got to say today.

What is it about 9-11 that holds such power over us? More Americans have died, after all, in Iraq and Afghanistan than did during that one day. There have been other big, national events -- Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing -- that got our attention when they happened but don't seem to affect us quite the same way. Why?

First of all, I think there is an argument to be made that each of these events affected our society significantly. Certainly the Kennedy assassination did. While I won't put all of the '60s on that event, it was a catalyst. Each generation seems to have their "big thing," and 9-11 was ours.

But something does separate the September 11th attacks in our consciousness. If it wasn't worse, it was different. It is different.

PTSD is unusual in its diagnoses because, unlike most disorders, the cause is part of the diagnosis. You can be diagnosed with depression, for example, without having something obvious causing your depression. But in PTSD, there are particular criteria the trauma has to meet.

First, the person must have witnessed an event that they sincerely believed had the possibility to threaten the life or physical integrity of or cause serious injury to themselves or others. September 11th? Check.

Second, the person must have responded, at the time, with feelings of intense fear, horror or helplessness. September 11th? Check.

Of course, the Kennedy assassination, for those who saw it or saw the footage, met those same criteria. But there is one key difference.

On September 11, 2001, we as a country all witnessed an event that killed over 3,000 people. But more than that, we experienced an event that we sincerely believed had the possibility of killing us. We didn't just have intense horror or helplessness. We had intense fear. We don't like to admit it, and maybe it seems a little silly looking back, but the simple fact that someone was out there targeting Americans simply for being Americans, coupled with the idea that regular folks went off to regular jobs and never came back, was and is really scary.

My daughter was 3 years old on 9-11. She didn't know what was going on, but slowly, over the following weeks, she asked questions about the things she noticed -- flags in windows, singing the "Bless America" song (as she called it). We answered the questions she asked and nothing more. But she knew it was bad. After one such conversation where I had to reassure her of her own safety as I tucked her in, I remember coming out of her room and saying, "The good news is, our daughter now feels perfectly safe. Now who's going to tuck me in and make me feel safe?"

The real truth is, no one is. We can't go back to thinking it can't happen. All we can do is acknowledge that it's there and it's scary, and remind ourselves that it's still really, really, really unlikely that any one of us will become a victim of a terrorist attack. If we can channel our inner toddler, maybe that will be enough.

All week I've been writing about how American society matches the symptom profile for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This morning, I took the first of those pieces to my writer's group, a small circle of women writers who share and respond to each other's work every Friday mornings. I knew it was not my best work, and I wanted feedback.

As usual, the group was very helpful, but one of their reactions caught me by surprise. Members felt that my writing was distressing (not in terms of quality, but in terms of topic), and that I needed to give information on how to deal with that distress. So I'm taking a detour from the exploration of PTSD in a post 9-11 society to help all you Quarterbackers out there as we head into the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

Perhaps the most important thing you should know is that, if you're feeling blah this week, or sad, or anxious, or irritable, or having trouble sleeping, or anything else that makes you feel "off," even if you do not consciously connect those feelings to this anniversary, you're normal. Anniversaries are very powerful, and quite often people who don't even realize that it is an anniversary have negative reactions nonetheless. This isn't helped by the terrorism alert for New York and Washington. What might be somewhat distressing anyway only feels magnified given the time of year.

You also aren't crazy if you are sick and tired of the anniversary coverage (although chances are you aren't reading this, so I may be wasting my breath). The extra coverage is draining because it prevents us from getting away from the intense memories and the feelings they evoke.

Whichever of these two groups you most identify with, you're normal. Don't waste one minute worrying that your reaction is too much or not enough or inappropriate, any more than you would criticize yourself for feeling pain when you stub your toe. You couldn't control those feelings if you wanted to, so don't bother trying.

But what can you do? If the coverage or the date or the blogging about our messed-up society is bothering you, what is the solution? You may not like the answer, because here's what it isn't. Turning off the TV, avoiding reading my blog, doing something completely non-9-11 related on Sunday and generally trying to get your mind off it may feel good for the moment, but it is a quick fix for a longer term problem. That's because problem isn't the reminders of the attack, it's how upsetting they are to you. Avoiding the reminders won't solve the underlying issue, it will just push it back underground.

What I suggest is completely counter-intuitive. When you find yourself having negative feelings -- sadness, fear, hurt, anger, guilt, shame or whatever -- don't try to turn away from them. Turn towards them. Identify what you are feeling and what caused it. Label them consciously. Don't try to explain it rationally, because emotions are not rational -- they're, well, emotional. Whatever you're feeling just is, so you might as well feel it.

The reason this is a good idea is that, when you turn and face your negative emotions, they stop feeling so overwhelming. Feelings, by themselves, do not hurt us. What we tell ourselves about those feelings and the events that trigger them can. No one likes to feel sad or afraid, but you can tolerate it. Your negative emotion loses its power when you acknowledge it and face it head on.

Does this mean you should glue yourself to the TV and watch as much coverage as you can this weekend? No. Just as avoiding reminders isn't healthy, seeking them out to excess isn't, either. Watch, read and hear what interests and moves you or is meaningful to you. Consider for yourself what type of commemoration, if any, you believe is appropriate for you to participate in. Just monitor yourself and be careful when you find yourself saying things like, "I can't watch that," "I want to get my mind off it," or "I won't be able to handle that." Those are signs you're avoiding, and you're not turning into the wind.

For me, this Sunday is about reclaiming September 11th as a day of grief and fear -- yes, I'm reclaiming fear -- and as a day of unity, service and collective support. I am allowing myself to feel the sadness and, as hard as it is, some of the horror of that day. And I'm patting myself on the back for doing it, because it isn't easy. I hope you'll join me.

We're continuing to look at the ways American society is manifesting behaviors indicative of PTSD in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. Today's topic is the third cluster of symptoms, "Hyper-Arousal." People with PTSD are, in many ways, in a permanent state of fight or flight. They are overly alert and on guard. So are we.

People with PTSD have at least two of the following symptoms:

Difficulty falling or staying asleep. It's somewhat difficult to judge how much of America's current sleep deprivation has happened since 9-11.  It is certainly well documented that on average we don't get enough sleep. What's more, we don't value sleep as a society. Few people work in places where the boss will tell you not to come in if you're tired. In fact, we don't consider exhaustion do be a legitimate reason to take a sick day -- that's faking. More and more, our institutions function on the assumption that we are awake at all hours. Congress works into the wee hours of the morning. The funniest television is on past 11. The announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden was made late at night even though it had happened hours before -- couldn't it have waited until the morning? We assume no one is sleeping, and we may be right.

Irritability or outbursts of anger. I talked at some length about how angry we are as a society in yesterday's post. Everything is a place to draw the line, make a stand and stand our ground. You're either with us or against us, with us or with the terrorists. Comparisons between politicians, political parties, grassroots organizations and the Nazis are so common we're not even surprised anymore when someone makes them.

Difficulty concentrating. Let's face it. The American public has the attention span of a flea, with apologies to all the hardworking fleas out there. The "news cycle" is getting shorter and shorter and it is easier and easier to push a big story out of it. We can't stick with a substantive news story for more than a day. A mass shooting or a celebrity wedding, sure, but not hunger, poverty, public policy or the wars. We're on to the next.

Hyper-vigilance. Consider this. The risk of a terrorist attack on American soil was no different on September 12, 2001 than it was on September 10, 2001. Does that even seem possible to you? It barely does to me. What changed on September 11 was not the risk, but our knowledge of the risk. And since then, we're constantly looking for the next one.

You can make a reasonable argument that we should be more vigilant than we were before. We were naive, and now we know. We're smarter than we were. The thing is, we're not only vigilant in smart ways. We are constantly trying to prevent whatever plot was the last one, successful or not. We take off our shoes, put up with backscatter screening and don't carry liquids on planes because those steps might have prevented a previous attempt, not because we have any reason to think anyone's going to try them in the future.

We profile Arabs and Muslims horrifically. A report that came out in the last couple of days indicates that the Mall of America has been reporting people, two thirds of them non-white, for such suspicious and sinister behavior as forgetting their cell phone at the food court or pacing outside the bathroom while they wait for a companion. This isn't just a lesson learned, it's hyper-arousal.

What's more, we seem to also be defending against entirely imagined threats. The fact, for example, that Sarah Palin said that Paul Revere was telling the British they weren't going to be taking away our arms was not just wrong, it was weird. There's a segment of society that has been obsessed with the idea that the government, or more specifically the Obama administration, is trying to take their firearms. We're more than two years into Obama's term, and not one gun control measure has been proposed. We're afraid of being unable to defend ourselves and sure that that's what "they" want, but it's not based in reality.

Exaggerated startle response. Last year, a major international terrorism scare was triggered by someone shipping watches that were taped together. A plane was grounded because a man was putting on tefillin, the leather boxes with straps that Orthodox Jewish men wear when they pray. We're a little bit jumpy.

A couple of years ago, I was flying from Washington, DC to Detroit with my family. There are four of us, so it often winds up that the two kids sit with one parent and the other sits alone. On this occasion, I was alone. The man sitting next to me put his bags in the overhead compartment and sat down. I wasn't paying much attention. Then he spoke to me, in good but accented English: "My name is Ahmed. I am a dentist from Toledo. You are safe." How jumpy must the average member of the traveling public be around Arab men on planes that Ahmed felt he needed to say that before I even registered him at all?

So, we've established that we're all acting in very PTSD-congruent ways. But why did 9-11 do this to us in a way that the Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing or the Challenger disaster did not? I'll be looking at that tomorrow.

Yesterday I shared the idea that America, as a society, is manifesting symptoms of PTSD. There are three sets of these symptoms, and today we'll be looking at symptoms of numbing. People with PTSD go to great lengths to avoid and/or numb themselves to feelings and experiences related to the trauma.

Specifically, to be diagnosed with PTSD, there must be at least three of the following symptoms present:

Efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversations associated with the trauma. Traumatized people often come across as angry. It's not that they don't have a right to be angry at the people who traumatized them. But they're often just angry all the time at everyone. Anger is a very effective defense mechanism against other, more uncomfortable feelings.

If there's one thing Americans are, it's angry. You need look no further than Capitol Hill. We don't just disagree, we think the other side is a threat and evil. We are locked and loaded. And we're rude.

So, what feelings are we avoiding? Fear. If you think back to how you felt on September 11, you weren't mad. You were horrified, and you were scared. Pretty quickly, you were sad. If someone had asked you if you were mad at the people who did this you would have said yes, but anger was not the primary emotion.

The thing is that fear doesn't feel good. It feels weak. So does sadness. Anger feels strong. So we stick with anger -- at each other, at other countries, at whomever. Do you remember that feeling of togetherness we all had right after the attacks? Have you wondered why we can't seem to get it back? Because we came together in fear and in grief, and as much as we might like togetherness, we don't want to go back and feel those things again.

Efforts to avoid activities, places, or people that arouse recollections of the trauma. There was a contingent of people who got mad at President Obama for visiting Ground Zero after bin Laden was killed. They said he was politicizing September 11th (and I would argue that ship sailed a long time ago, but let's put that aside).  But Obama didn't go there to give a speech or do a victory lap. He went to lay a wreath. He went to acknowledge grief. That's a no-no.

Inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma. There are certainly things about 9-11 that none of us will ever forget, but here's a test question: Following the September 11th attacks, what was the stated motivation of Al Qaeda for attacking the U.S.? If you said something like, "They hate us for our freedoms," you're not alone -- that is our dominant societal narrative. It was started by President Bush the same week as the attacks. And, if I may be so bold, it's wrong. At the time of the attacks, Al Qaeda wanted the U.S. to withdraw its troops from bases in Saudi Arabia, which it considers sacred ground. We forgot the motivation for the attack almost as soon as it happened.

Markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities. This is a tough one. "Significant activities" for individuals are easier to define. However, I'm struggling to remember the last time it seemed like everyone was having a joint experience -- like the last episode of M*A*S*H, or even the Superbowl. Is it me, or is it just harder for us to all decide that something, other than a disaster or trauma, is important these days?

Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others. We know who our allies are in official terms. But what foreign country do we as Americans truly respect as partners these days? I can think of no one. We have become a very lonely country in a lot of significant ways. You can blame politics or policies for this, but it's also the manifestation of a gut feeling that no one really understands us.

Restricted range of affect (e.g., unable to have loving feelings). As discussed above, our primary societal emotion is anger. We don't feel joint happiness or pride anymore. We don't "put aside politics" for any common purpose. We want Congress to compromise, as long as they don't compromise on the things we want. We have lost the ability to have mixed emotions, and changing one's mind about something is weak. This is what a restricted range of emotions looks like -- anger and black and white thinking with no nuance.

Sense of foreshortened future. There is a conventional wisdom in America that the United States is no longer a superpower, or that we won't be one for much longer. Polls show we believe America is headed in the wrong direction. Every new law or policy (passed or just proposed) on both sides of the aisle is met with doomsday scenarios about how it will mean the end of America as we know it. It's one thing to say you don't like an idea, and quite another to think we can't survive it. We don't, as a country, feel very confident about our future.

Tomorrow I'll look at the third cluster of symptoms -- hyper-arousal. Later in the week, we'll examine why 9-11 impacted us this way when other things didn't, and at what kind of "treatment" we might recommend for our traumatized society.

As you almost certainly know, last Friday a massive explosion rocked Oslo, Norway. Shortly thereafter, a gunman opened fire at a camp run by the Labour Party on a nearby island. In all, 76 people were killed and many more injured. Many of the victims were children.

For a brief time on Friday, it was reported that a previously unknown radical Islamist group had taken responsibility for the attacks. The stories in the mainstream media generally represented two different views of this (we now know incorrect) fact.

View 1 was that this showed how dangerous Muslims in Europe are. View 2 was that this was a case of a small minority of Muslims twisting the religion to suit their own purposes and beliefs, and should not be viewed as typical of all Muslims or the religion itself.

Soon it came out that, in fact, the perpetrator in these attacks was a Norwegian citizen upset over immigration and multiculturalism. Two views quickly emerged about this as well. View 1 holds that this is the inevitable result of dangerous rhetoric on the part of conservatives. View 2 holds that this man is clearly mentally ill, and his actions should not be held against an entire political ideology.

There are certainly parallels between these two sets of views. Either the person responsible is representative of their group or they are the exception but not the rule. But there is one notable difference -- in the first scenario, neither view considers mental illness to be a factor.

What is going on here, in both scenarios, is people's attempt to distance themselves from those responsible. They are not like us. They are other. They are different. That means that we are not at risk of becoming like them, and we are less vulnerable to them because their difference may be easy to detect. In the first scenario, the difference in question is one of religion. American mainstream media is largely a Judeo-Christian business. From that perspective, Muslims, whether a handful of radicals or an entire religion, are not "us."

Once it was clear that the perpetrator was European, however, we regrouped. For those on the political left, it was easy to point to him as being on the political right. For those on the right, however, "othering" him was more difficult. He must be mentally ill.

I actually think that this perpetrator probably is mentally ill. Whether that is the whole story or political ideology also plays a part is open for debate. What is interesting to me, though, is that we tend not to consider that suicide bombers from Al-Qaeda, or Osama Bin Laden, or anyone in that general category may be mentally ill. Some of that is racism. Some of it is the ease of separating ourselves from them if we are not Muslim ourselves.

But if you consider it, the narrative of the Oslo massacre probably should be that these attacks were carried out by a deranged person or persons. What religion or ethnic group they are from is not, from that perspective, all that important.

Someone is sending letters to Washington, D.C. schools with white powder in them. The letters, which also contain the typewritten message, "AL AQEDA-FBI [sic]," have arrived at at least 28 schools thus far, and four more letters have been intercepted. Authorities say that the substance inside them is not hazardous, although they haven't said what it is.

If you do a Google News search for "white powder schools" you will find numerous incidents over the last decade, plus a bunch involving various organizations, institutions, and even Dancing With the Stars. Apparently, something similar even happened in Washington schools last October.

Am I the only one who remembers a time when it would have been the furthest thing from someone's mind to try to scare people with cornstarch? Before the anthrax attacks of 2001, this just wasn't on anyone's radar screen -- not even the lunatic fringe. Since then, it seems like almost an epidemic.

In 2001, schools in Western Pennsylvania (and perhaps elsewhere -- I just happened to work in Western PA at the time) had to scramble over "white powders." A local supplier of science curriculum had a 5th grade science explorations unit which many districts used which asked students to identify various "mystery powders," all of them white. All of a sudden, this didn't seem like a good idea, and replacement units had to be created or purchased.

As far as I can tell from the news coverage of the latest incident, the level of panic occurring at the schools involved is extremely low. It looks like people opened the letters and notified the authorities, who took it seriously and came out to the schools. I'm not seeing reports of school personnel becoming hysterical or evacuating buildings. I'm not seeing any reaction from kids, which seems to indicate that most of them didn't know about it. One school did notice the letter before it came inside and left it outside -- that seems cautious without being a complete overreaction.

The thing is, if we panic every time someone does this, then the bozos who are doing it get what they want. This encourages future bozos to do the same thing. Would it be safer to evacuate every building where this happens? Maybe, maybe not. We may be at the point where the chances of someone getting hurt in the evacuation -- tripping, stepping on something, getting hit by lightning, being a crime victim, getting hit by a car -- are actually greater than the chances of someone getting hurt by a mystery powder in a letter.

You might be surprised to know that the same logic often applies to bomb threats in schools. Many schools do not routinely evacuate if they receive a bomb threat. They wait for the advice of the police and fire departments regarding the specific threat. That's because if you know you can disrupt school -- any school, but particularly your own school -- by phoning in a bomb threat, then this becomes a very attractive thing for kids to do to get out of exams and such. Add to this the risk that someone will phone in a bomb threat and then wait for everyone to start coming outside and do something to them there, and evacuating is not always the thing to do. It depends on the situation.

Often times parents, in particular, don't want to hear that not evacuating is the best thing. Our knee-jerk reaction is that we should evacuate kids if there is any risk or threat. The thing is, that may not be in the best of interests of the kids. If we actually did that, we could well spend every day going in and out of school buildings. Schools have to evaluate relative risk, just as parents do at home. We don't get everyone outside when our dirty ovens start to smoke at home, or every time we hear a funny noise in the night. In loco parentis means that schools must act with the same care that parents would at home, not that they must jump every time someone says "boo." It would be a lot easier, however, if people didn't think it was a good idea to say "boo" in the first place.

Yesterday, I shared with you my thoughts about explaining Osama bin Laden to children. I was apparently not the only person worrying about this. Time ran a piece which began,

President Obama certainly wasn't taking the sensibilities of West Coast children into consideration when he made his stunner of a speech Sunday night.

Parents in the Pacific time zone found themselves scrambling to explain the news in real time, and some of them were pretty unhappy about it.

While I certainly understand the problems of trying to explain this stuff to kids -- that's why I wrote yesterday's piece in the first place -- I will admit to feeling a little frustrated with those who would make this complaint. If there was one thing we all should have learned from 9-11, it is that live television is unpredictable. Anything can happen at any time. Part of being a parent is recognizing this and using it to make decisions about whether your children can watch TV, and whether you will choose to watch things live. Part of being a parent is also realizing that kids will inevitably ask about things we'd just as soon they not know about, and we have to answer the questions when they come.

In addition, speaking as someone from the east coast, Obama's speech didn't start until way past my bedtime. If he had waited until every kid in the country was asleep, he wouldn't catch a whole lot of adults, either. News happens when it happens. If you don't want your kids to see it, don't turn on the news.

That having been said, I have been somewhat appalled by what some media outlets have chosen to run in their coverage of bin Laden's death. Yesterday afternoon I was listening to "Here and Now," a public radio show from WBUR in Boston. They had the usual talking heads discussing the implications of bin Laden's death, which was all well and good. At the very end, the host said that his death also brought us "back in time" to 9-11. They then proceeded, with explanation of what each clip was, to play the audio of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center (complete with screaming), audio of someone who died in the towers on the phone, and audio of a very frightened voicemail message left by someone who died.

I cried. Then I got mad. Don't get me wrong, I certainly understand that this weekend's events bring back memories of 9-11, and to some extent they will trigger any unresolved trauma we all have. But wasn't the memory enough? Did we really need the extra boost of some vivid sensory input? Did we need to invade the privacy of dead people just one more time? Were they afraid we wouldn't remember unless they retraumatized us? And if you're worried about the sensibilities of children, would you want your kids hearing that with no warning at all?

9-11 is unique in our collective experience because it was a trauma for almost everyone in the country. That means that, in planning what to broadcast, you have to treat everyone in the audience as a trauma victim. You wouldn't force the victim of a shooting, for example, to listen to the audio of the incident without a good reason. We all deserve a little less sensationalism and a little more respect for how raw this still feels.

* The artwork on this post, like yesterday's, comes from the FEMA website and was created by a 5th grader at Chagrin Falls Intermediate School for the 1st anniversary of 9-11.

I can trace my expertise talking to children about traumatic events directly to the night when my 3 year-old daughter asked, as I was tucking her into bed, "Why is everyone singing the 'Bless America' song?" It was September 14, 2001. We had been at a previously scheduled party, and at 7 o'clock we spilled out in front of the house, lit candles, and sang.

This was the first of many questions my daughter would have about 9-11, then and many times in the years that followed. We tried our best to answer them in an age-appropriate way. We wanted to give her answers that were honest and respected the question, but not overwhelm her with frightening information. I like to think we did a decent job.

This morning, when my husband told our daughter that Osama bin Laden had been killed, she reacted with disbelief. "No way. Osama bin Laden, gone?" To her, the bogey-man had been vanquished. Then her brother piped up. "Who's Osama bin Laden?" My husband responded, "It's hard to explain."

My son will be 6 this week. As much as bin Laden was the bogey-man of my daughter's early childhood, he was completely irrelevant to my son. That by itself is amazing.

In our house, "It's hard to explain" really means, "Go ask Mommy, she's good at this sort of thing." So it fell to me. I wanted to give an honest answer to an honest question. But I knew the answer would be potentially scary, and so I wanted to make sure the answer removed any danger as much as possible from my son's experience.

Here's what I said:

A long time ago, when your sister was little -- she was 3 -- some very mean people attacked our country. The man in charge of the mean people was named Osama bin Laden. We wanted to catch him and arrest him for what his people had done, but we couldn't find him. We looked for him for almost 10 years. Then, yesterday, our soldiers found him in the country of Pakistan. They tried to arrest him, but he didn't want to go. He shot a gun at the soldiers, and they shot guns back, and he died.

For today, this answer satisfied my son. I know from his sister's experience that it will not satisfy him for long. Inevitably, he will eventually ask why the mean people attacked us, and what they did. We will tell him that they were angry at our country because they didn't like that our government had soldiers in a part of the world they believed was holy, and they stole planes and crashed them into buildings. In his sister's case, it took her many, many years to realize that there were people on the planes that were stolen. By then, she was old enough to not translate that into an abject fear of flying. Hopefully my son will be, too.

I'm sure my son is not the only little kid asking this question today. I'm sure my husband is not the only parent at something of a loss for how to explain the situation. If my explanation can help you talk to your own kids, please feel free to borrow. I've also heard very good things about the books The Day America Cried and The Little Chapel That Stood for discussing 9-11 with little ones.

We owe our children honest answers to honest questions. If we don't give them that now, who will they be able to turn to when the next bogey-man comes along?

* The artwork on this post was created by a 5th grader at Chagrin Falls Intermediate School in Chagrin, OH for the 1st anniversary of 9-11, and comes from the FEMA website.

Imagine, if you will, that an American, motivated by hatred of, let's say, Roman Catholics, drove to New York City and parked a car full of explosives outside St. Patrick's Cathedral during a funeral, only to be caught by the FBI on a tip from a bar employee who had heard the man ranting about Catholics earlier. Surely this would be a big story. It wouldn't take more than a day for it to hit the news, and we'd be hearing major coverage.

Now let's substitute a few facts. Instead of Catholics, let's insert Muslims. Instead of New York, let's move to Dearborn, Michigan -- the Detroit suburb with the highest concentration of Arab-Americans in the United States. Now the plot can't be against St. Patrick's, of course, so we'll move it to the Islamic Center of America -- the largest mosque in the Detroit metropolitan area. The rest of the facts are the same. What kind of press coverage do you expect?

I hope your expectations aren't very high, because this actually happened on Monday. It didn't hit the media even locally until this morning, six days after the arrest and four days after the man was arraigned. It took the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) releasing a press statement to get anyone's attention. It's not the top story in Michigan news even now that it has gotten some coverage.

I find this particularly poignant given that Americans have been watching round-the-clock coverage of the unrest in Egypt this week. My Facebook page has lit up with postings asking me to sign various petitions asking our government to stand with the people of Egypt. I'd like to suggest that we might like to stand with Americans of Egyptian extraction as well. The situations are not the same, certainly. But I can imagine nothing more dehumanizing than being the target of a mass murder plot, foiled at the last moment, and it not even registering as a blip on anyone's radar screen.

Thursday night, a giant explosion ripped through a neighborhood in San Bruno, California.  The blast and subsequent fire, apparently caused by a ruptured gas line, leveled 38 homes and killed at least 7 people.  Six more are missing. 

I don't know about you, but if you gave me an hour to list all the horrendous things that could happen to me I could come up with a pretty long list, but I doubt a gas explosion destroying my neighborhood would be on it.  It certainly wouldn't be on the top.  We all know, in the back of our minds, that there are certain things that could happen to us -- car accidents, homicide, natural disasters (different ones, depending on where you live) -- but there are other things that just don't make the list because they are so rare we don't know about them.  Gas leaks?  Sure.  Gas explosions?  Maybe.  The entire neighborhood detonating?  Not so much.

I'm not sure whether that makes the typical person's reaction to this better or worse, but it does make it different.  When we hear about, say, a horrible car accident that killed multiple people, it may make us more afraid to drive.  We may lose our own sense of safety on the road.  We may imagine what it would be like to be a family member getting that call, or to be on the road and witness or be involved in the crash.

Our reaction when something so bizarre happens is a little bit different.  Yes, we probably are more sensitive to the smell of gas or more careful not to leave the stove on.  We probably don't spend a lot of time imagining what it would be like to be in the incident itself, largely because we just can't.  Even once it's happened somewhere, our minds can't yet process fully how such an event would play out.

The most important difference is the quality and amount of fear we may feel.  When we hear about a car accident, if we feel afraid we feel afraid when we drive, or when our loved ones drive.  The fear is specific to the incident.  An extraordinary incident like the San Bruno explosion, however, can cause two different kinds of reactions:  either it seems so unlikely that even though it's happened it doesn't seem possible, or it seems so random that the entire world seems less safe.  Our fears, if we have them, are not specific to gas lines or even to sitting in our homes.  They are about something completely random coming out of nowhere and hurting us.  We don't react to the sudden discovery that a specific situation is not safe, we react to the discovery that the world is not safe.

Most of us experienced this kind of reaction nine years ago, after the 9-11 attacks.  The fear we felt and the reactions we had were not necessarily about flying or working in an office building or even about the type of person we presumed to be the terrorists.  It was fundamentally about the notion that a day could start as normally as that day did, and turn into such a nightmare without warning.  Our worldview was violated not because we used to think flying was safe and now it wasn't, but because we used to think that life was safe and we found out maybe we were wrong.  The people of San Bruno found that out again this week, and in some small way, so did the rest of us.

Two Yemeni men living in the United States were arrested yesterday in Amsterdam after flying there from Chicago.  Initial reports indicated that the men were under suspicion for carrying out a "dry run" of a terrorist attack.  The news reports this morning said that one of the men had been stopped in Alabama by TSA officers and found to be carrying $7,000 in cash.  When his checked luggage was searched, officers found a cell phone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle, several watches taped together, and knives and a box-cutter.  Since none of that is prohibited, he was allowed to travel to Chicago.  Instead of continuing on to Washington as planned, however, he booked a flight to Amsterdam.  The other suspect did the same.  The suspicious luggage continued on to Washington and was checked through to the United Arab Emirates.  Authorities returned the flight out of New York to the gate and removed the luggage, and alerted authorities in the Netherlands.

American authorities now suggest that, in fact, this was all a big misunderstanding.  The two men did not know each other.  They both missed the flight to Washington and were rebooked by the airline through Amsterdam.  Passengers traveling to foreign countries, particularly third world countries, frequently carry cash for relatives and friends, and they frequently tape valuables into bundles or to large objects to make them harder to steal. 

In between the first version of this story and the second one, news organizations seemed to have every expert (real or imagined) on airline security commenting on this incident.  The consensus seemed to be that everything that could have been done wrong was.  People suspected of terrorism were allowed to fly and allowed to be separated from their luggage.  Imagine what could have gone wrong!!

First of all, I hate this line of reasoning.  Boiled down to its bare bones, what these folks are saying is that the conclusive proof that we can't stop something bad from happening is that something that was judged not to be imminently dangerous was, in fact, not imminently dangerous.  If that's true, what would be the conclusive proof that we can stop something bad from happening?

I actually have an easier time imagining what could have gone right in this situation, had this been handled differently.  I don't know enough to know whether arresting these men was the right or the reasonable thing to do.  However, it seems to me that if it took less than 12 hours to go from being sure they were evil to thinking it was all a coincidence, then maybe they could have waited 12 hours to go public with the information in the first place.

You may remember that I'm generally not a fan of sitting on information in a crisis.  Withholding information from anxious people is almost universally a bad idea, because it makes them more anxious.  In this instance, however, it's not clear to me that anyone would have been anxious if they hadn't released the information when they did.  If there was a leak, and the preliminary information would have gotten out anyway, then certainly the authorities were right to talk about it.  But they missed the opportunity to, instead of saying that they thought this was a dry run for a terror attack, say that they were still investigating and they'd get back to us.

Crisis communication shouldn't be this hard.  Tell what you know.  Don't speculate.  Stick to the facts.  Acknowledge the anxiety.  Make it clear that more information will be forthcoming.  Then stop talking.  It's common sense, really.  Unfortunately, it's not so common.

Last Monday, a pipe bomb combined with gasoline exploded in back of the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville.  Sixty people were worshiping inside at the time.  No one was injured, although the building suffered minor damage and filled with smoke for a short time. A $20,000 reward has been offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the bomber, who was captured on surveillance camera.  He appears to be a middle aged white male.

The national media has not picked up the story of the Jacksonville mosque bombing to any great extent.  If you do a Google News search for "Jacksonville Mosque" you will turn up numerous stories from the Florida press, as well as an assortment of national blogs discussing the fact that the national media has ignored this story, but not much else.  Most of these national blogs note the implied prejudice of major news outlets failing to pick up what certainly appears to be an attempted terrorist attack that could have killed 60 people, but whose victims are Muslim.

I don't disagree with these bloggers.  However, I think even they are guilty of what scholars sometimes call "othering."  They are outraged at the act itself, and at the media for failing to cover it.  But they don't go as far as to express empathy with the community that was attacked.  They are reacting to the politics, but not to the impact of the attack itself.  Someone has attacked those "other" people, and we (presumably "typical") people are outraged by the attack and outraged at the media.  But we aren't caring for the victims.

For the religiously affiliated among you, try to imagine how you might feel if your church or synagogue were attacked.  How safe would you feel at the next service?  How confident would you feel parking in the parking lot?  How much sleep would you lose?  How much grief might you feel for actual damage done?  And how much anticipatory grief might you feel at the thought of damage that might yet be done?

Now imagine that the bulk of those who support your congregation expressed that support by insisting that the news cover the incident.  Surely you'd appreciate that.  There's nothing wrong with taking a firm stand that such attacks are unacceptable regardless of who the victims are, and that media should report them without bias.  But wouldn't you want some of those same folks to stop by your church or synagogue or your house?  Wouldn't you want them to try to understand your fear and how very personally you took this attack?  Wouldn't you want people to stand up, not just for you, but also with you?

I have nothing against the bloggers who have pointed out the media's bias.  It needs to be done.  But it is only the first step.  I challenge my blogging brethren not just to cover the politics of this attack and its coverage, but to really try to understand how it feels to be a victim of it, and bring that experience to their readers.  Until we are able, as a blogosphere, to see victims of anti-Islamic violence as "us" rather than "them," it will continue to be easy for people to turn that othering to violence.

This weekend someone packed a bunch of explosive and flammable material into an SUV and parked it in Times Square in New York.  The investigation of this is the number one most popular story on Google News today, and I am not going to blog about it.  President Obama gave the commencement speech at the University of Michigan here in Ann Arbor, and I'm not blogging about that either.  Thousands of gallons of oil are threatening the Gulf Coast, and I probably will blog about that tomorrow.  Massachusetts is still without drinking water, and I blogged about that yesterday.  You probably knew about all of these things (perhaps not the U of M story, but you would if you lived here).

Early this morning, Detroit police officers responding to shots fired in a vacant apartment were ambushed.  Four were wounded, one was killed.  Officer Brian Huff became the first line of duty death in the Detroit Police Department since 2004.  The national press barely covered it.  The Ann Arbor press, 40 minutes from Detroit, didn't cover it at all.  Neither did the Michigan-wide public radio affiliate.

Certainly a lot more people are affected by the Massachusetts water situation and the oil spill in the Gulf.  The President speaking in town is pretty rare.  The bomb in Times Square affected a lot of people directly, and scares a lot of people vicariously.  All of these things are important.

In a typical year, there are less than 70 police officers nationwide that are killed by suspects.  Michigan has had two this year, but had none last year.  This isn't terribly common.  It may not affect as many people as some of the other stories, but those it does impact are affected much more severely.  Frequent Quarterbackers may recall that there is a whole Critical Incident Stress Management course just on responding to the 5 most serious types of incidents.  Not only is death in the line of duty one of those, but there is actually an additional course just on that.

So why did Officer Huff's death and his colleagues' shootings get so little attention?  I think there are two reasons.  First, there was a lot of news affecting a lot of people this weekend, which meant that this story had to more actively compete for coverage.  Second, Detroit has a lousy reputation for high crime.  In other words, people think that this sort of thing is about par for the course in Detroit.  This is especially ironic since, although Detroit's crime rate is high, its rate of line of duty deaths for police officers isn't.  By any objective standard, this ought to be a big story.  We just don't make those judgments by objective standards.

There is no community in this country for which a police officer shot in the line of duty feels normal.  The Detroit press is covering this story closely.  It's the rest of us, outside (but not all that far outside) of Detroit that are turning a blind eye.  We think "those people" in "that city" expect this sort of thing.  Unfortunately, we think wrong.

About 13 years ago, I attended the funeral of my great aunt Clara.  She had lived a very long life and her friends and family turned out to honor her and to be with each other in a time of grief.  Aunt Clara was active in her synagogue Sisterhood, and at the end of the service the Rabbi announced that the members of the Sisterhood -- a quite elderly bunch themselves, at least the ones who were in attendance at the funeral -- would show their respect by forming their "customary honor guard" in the aisle as the casket was removed from the sanctuary.  As these little old ladies hobbled towards the aisle, my father leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Cross swords."  Then, of course, we had a problem, because we were giggling at a very serious moment of a funeral.

My father will tell you that he is at his funniest at funerals.  I was reminded of this because last night a man was taken into custody by Air Marshals on board a flight from Washington to Denver after he said he was trying to light his shoe on fire.  F-16s were scrambled and escorted the plane to the ground.  As it turns out, the passenger, a Qatari diplomat, was actually trying to sneak a cigarette in the airplane lavatory.  When he was confronted, he said he was trying to light his shoe.

There are two interpretations of what happened.  The one that surfaced first, and the one that reminded me of my father, was that the man was trying to make a joke out of what had happened.  The other interpretation making the rounds this evening is that this wasn't an attempt at a joke, it was a sarcastic barb.  In this version, the passenger wasn't saying, "Ha, ha, just trying to light my shoe!  Hardy har har!  Not smoking!  No sirree!" as much as he was saying, "You people are so ridiculous singling me out for smoking.  You probably think I was trying to set fire to my shoe, you morons."

I wasn't there, of course, so I can't tell you which interpretation is correct.  Anyone who has seen the warning signs at American airport security checkpoints, however, knows that you simply don't joke about explosives or make reference to them in any way when you're talking to security or airport or airline personnel.  So why did this man say something so incredibly foolish?

It's tempting to answer by saying he is stupid or arrogant, and I suppose either could be true.  But there is a much more human explanation -- the same explanation as the one for why my father is such a laugh riot at funerals.  It's not that either of them don't get it.  It's that on an instinctive level, this seems like the best way to deal with it.

All of us have an idea in mind of how we think people "should" act under pressure.  We also have an expectation for how we ourselves will act should we ever be in the midst of a serious crisis.  The trouble is, those expectations are based on rational thought, and rational thought goes right out the window under pressure.  It turns out there is no "right" way to act when threatened, or grieving, or in shock.  It also turns out that people do pretty nutty things because they seem like the thing to do at the time. 

My father thinks of his funniest comments at inappropriate times because they're inappropriate times, and he instinctively is fighting back against the seriousness and the sadness.  This Qatari diplomat made a remark about lighting his shoe most likely because that was precisely what he thought the crew might be worried about (and he was probably right).  Putting it out there -- in jest or in anger -- seemed on an instinctive level like the best way to deflect the situation.  No, it probably was not the best idea, but he didn't have time to think of the best idea.  In a moment of great seriousness, all he could think of to say was the cigarette-on-an-airplane equivalent of "Cross swords."

As you probably know, a man with a history of mental illness, a strong belief in conspiracy theories and a serious animosity towards the United States government approached two police officers at the Pentagon Metro station last night and opened fire.  The officers returned fire, mortally wounding him.  They suffered relatively minor injuries.  Whether your classify this as random violence, a failure of the mental health system, or terrorism, it's clear that this was a relatively minor incident as these things go, and while the death of the shooter is a tragedy for his family this obviously could have been much worse.

You might not have heard, in the stories about this incident, about Dan Namisi.  Mr. Namisi is a native of Uganda and a resident of Virginia who happened to be nearby when the shooting started.  He hit the ground as fast as he could, which aside from being a natural reflex is also a relatively good way to avoid being shot in a situation like this.  Officers responding to the shots immediately approached him, handcuffed and searched him and placed him in a police car.  He was held for three hours.

Mr. Namisi tells the Associated Press that he thinks he aroused suspicions because, when he dropped to the ground, he cut his hand.  He was near the shooting and appeared to be injured, and he therefore appeared to be involved.  I will say that I think Mr. Namisi is more charitable in his interpretation of what made him a suspect than I am, but really the main issue is that he was right there when the incident occurred.  It took the police a while to make sure they had figured out what had happened.

Mr. Namisi says he is traumatized.  It's easy to let that remark go by if you're not reading carefully.  After all, who wouldn't be traumatized by having to hit the pavement due to a shooting right next to you?  But he isn't referring to the shooting.  He's referring to the experience of being taken into custody by the police.

In fact, I suspect that the trauma here is actually both things.  Being suspected of something really terrible that you really didn't do, particularly if you come from a country where the justice system is not known for its fairness or good treatment of suspects, is traumatizing by itself.  Being a witness to a shooting where you fear that your own life is in danger is traumatizing by itself.  Having both things back to back is probably worse than the sum of its parts. 

All the physical and emotional responses to trauma were already going for Mr. Namisi when the police handcuffed him.  That means that his body and mind were that much less able to cope with the new trauma when it happened.  Not only did he not have an opportunity to come down from the surge of stress hormones that occurred when the first shots were fired, he got a second surge on top of it.  At a minimum, he's got to be exhausted.

I am in no position to judge whether the police were reasonable in suspecting Mr. Namisi and holding him as long as they did.  I don't know how many, if any, other bystanders experienced the same thing, or what circumstances went into the police officers' decisions.  I do know that Dan Namisi had a really bad evening yesterday, and I hope someone took a moment to thank him for his time and apologize for the inconvenience.

The FBI officially ended its investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks today, after determining that a single Army scientist, acting alone, was responsible.  He suffered from significant mental illness and had worked on the vaccine against anthrax.  The letters included in the mailings, which at first blush appeared to be from a radical Muslim terrorist group, contained elaborate code that referenced two colleagues with whom he was obsessed.  There will be no arrest and no trial in this case.  The scientist the FBI says is responsible killed himself in 2008.

The mailer, as I'm sure you recall, wreaked havoc on the country, and particularly on the government and media outlets, by sending two batches of letters laced with anthrax through the postal system.  Five people died and 22 more were infected.  The majority of those infected were not targets themselves, but postal workers or people whose mail was contaminated as it passed through a contaminated facility.  Buildings were evacuated for anthrax contamination, both real and suspected, and Americans were literally frightened to touch their mail for weeks.

Given that, I suppose we should feel relief that we have gotten to the bottom of this and found that one person, who is no longer a threat to us, is responsible for the chaos of the fall of 2001.  He acted alone, he is dead, and we are not in danger.

I suspect I'm not alone, however, in finding this ending most unsatisfying.  We are used to big news stories having big conclusions.  It doesn't seem right that someone could single-handedly hold the entire country hostage, and even less right that he will never be brought to justice.  That's not how it plays out in the movies.

There is more than a need for dramatic closure in our news stories, however, driving this feeling of letdown.  There is also a sense that, although this case has been brought to an end, and with it the accompanying feeling that we are in danger from the anthrax mailer, a conclusion like this actually leaves us feeling still unnerved. 

The fact is, a single person did terrorize our country.  The fact is, if he could do it there are probably other people out there who could, too.  That makes this neither an isolated incident nor a coordinated campaign which we might be able to learn to live with, but a truly random act of violence which could occur, or not, at any time.  If there is one thing our minds do not like is unpredictable danger.  It leaves us always vaguely afraid and on edge.  In that sense, this single, seriously ill scientist has pulled off one of the most successful terrorist attacks in United States history.