Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Back in 1978, a woman named Cheryl Bradshaw was on the TV game show "The Dating Game."  For those of you who are younger than I, this show entailed a "bachelorette" interviewing three eligible bachelors whom she could not see.  At the end, she picked one to go out with.  Cheryl Bradshaw picked bachelor number 1, although reports indicate she didn't go out with him.  It turns out that he already had a felony conviction for raping an 8 year-old girl (something, one presumes, that Bradshaw didn't think to ask about on the show).  The year after his appearance, he embarked on a career as a serial killer, murdering four women and a girl.  The closing arguments in the penalty phase of his trial were today.

The "Dating Game" angle to this story came to light because one of the other bachelors came forward to share his recollections of bachelor number 1.  He refers to him as "creepy" and says there was something about him, even then, that made him want to get away.  It's hard to know how much of that reaction was real 32 years ago and how much is a projection based on current knowledge.  It's also hard to know whether the other bachelor is motivated purely by what he perceives as newsworthy information or by self-promotion.

The person I'd really like to hear from, however, is Cheryl Bradshaw.  News reports indicate that she refused to go out with the bachelor she picked, and I'm guessing she's pretty glad about that now.  She had a brush with death 32 years ago without knowing it. 

We all make choices every day that affect the outcome of our lives.  It's not at all unusual to look back at past romantic interests and wonder what might have been different had you made a different choice.  I have a cousin who, in her college days, turned down a fellow student named Barry Obama for a date.  Imagine the possibilities.

In fact, it's impossible to know what might have been.  Had my cousin made a different choice, she might be first lady today.  She might also have gone out with him once and decided he wasn't for her.  Or he could have, with a different choice of mate, gone in a totally different direction with his career, never entering politics at all.

The same uncertainty exists for Bradshaw.  If she had gone out with bachelor number 1, she might be dead.  She might have entered a life of crime herself.  She might have left it at one date and it would have made no difference.  He might have mended his ways.  We will never know, and there isn't a whole lot of point in speculating. 

I can only imagine, however, that learning what this man went on to do has given her a little bit of pause, and I think we can all forgive her for thinking about what might have been, no matter how pointless it may be.  Her connection to this man has to at least give her a passing shiver.

The United States Supreme Court agreed today to hear an appeal of a $5 million verdict against a number of members and clergy from Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS.  The case stems from the church's sponsorship of demonstrations at the funerals of servicemen and -women who have been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Their church teaches that God is punishing the United States for tolerating homosexuality, and that these casualties, the deaths on 9/11, and a number of other things are the result of this tolerance.  This particular case was brought after the group picketed the funeral of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder with such signs as "Thank God for Dead Soldiers."  The family sued for for emotional distress and invasion of privacy and won.

I should say at the outset that I find the teachings of Westboro Baptist Church completely repugnant, and I in no way wish to appear to defend what they did.  Whether or not their actions were protected by the Bill of Rights, they were incredibly offensive.  I also don't want to in any way appear to say that having these people show up at your loved one's funeral is a good thing, or even a neutral thing.

What I wonder, though, is how much emotional distress this protest actually caused.  I think we can probably agree it is not zero.  People processing a traumatic loss find comfort in some things and difficulty in others, and this definitely caused difficulty.  There is no question that the funeral would have been a better, more private, more tasteful event had the protesters not been there.

At the same time, however, this family was in a tremendous amount of emotional distress to begin with.  They were angry, they were in shock, they were undoubtedly a mess.  I have no doubt that the protesters completely enraged them, and I don't blame them one bit.  The question is, how much did the protesters make their emotional states worse, versus how much did they simply provide a really obvious and convenient target for those emotions?

I am sorry Lance Cpl. Snyder died.  I am sorry that these horrible people decided to picket his funeral -- they shouldn't have.  In the end, however, Snyder would be dead whether they showed up or not.  That would be awful, whether they showed up or not.  And that part isn't their fault.

On February 17 at about 8 AM, a small plane carrying three employees of Tesla Motors crashed on takeoff from Palo Alto Airport into a residential neighborhood in East Palo Alto, California.  All three people on board were killed, but miraculously no one on the ground was injured.  The ensuing fire damaged buildings and scorched the pavement of the street.

Frequent Quarterbacker Mike Miller, a longtime friend of mine, suggested shortly thereafter that I blog about the crash.  I will admit that I wasn't particularly intrigued.  I didn't have an "angle."  Planes crash.  Some privileged techies crashing into a much less privileged neighborhood did not make me want to blog about their survivors, harsh as that might seem. 

For Mike, on the other hand, this was a very interesting story.  Mike's father was a pilot for United Airlines for many years, and at one time he, too, aspired to be an airline pilot.  He flew small planes and loved aviation, even after his career plans shifted and he became an attorney.  I flew with him only once, the medication I took to avoid motion sickness putting me to sleep in the back seat of his plane as my stomach churned nonetheless.

Mike also lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where this was a big story.  To him, there was a lot to consider about this story, from the trauma it posed for the families to what it meant for other pilots like himself.  He had a personal connection to this incident in a way I never would.

Today's San Jose Mercury News has a story about the East Palo Alto neighborhood where the plane crashed last month.  The residents don't feel very safe right now, and one can hardly blame them.  The sky pretty literally fell on them, and they have no reassurance that it won't happen again.  The sound of every plane engine is a reminder of what happened and a trigger for their trauma reactions.  They look up with trepidation and wonder when the next plane will come down.  In a city rocked by gang violence, it is a plane crash that has residents thinking of moving out.

Usually I get my news stories from Google, the New York Times or suggestions from friends.  The article about this neighborhood did not cross my radar from any of these sources.  I was on the Mercury News website today looking to see if Mike Miller's obituary had been posted yet.  He died on Monday at the age of 39 after a truly spirited battle with melanoma.  He never got to read about the story he suggested, the story that was so personal to him, in this space.  Oddly enough, reading the article was a trigger for me, not because of the crash itself but because of Mike.  His memory is a blessing.

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 FDA announced a recall today of products containing hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) manufactured by Basic Food Flavors, Inc. due to possible salmonella contamination.  There have been no reports of injury or illness, but contamination at the plant has understandably caused concern.

If you are like me, you have some questions at this point.  The most obvious is probably, "What on earth is hydrolyzed vegetable protein?"  You may also wonder what it's in, and in particular what products contain HVP from this manufacturer.  It is these questions that pose an interesting crisis communication issue for the FDA.

As it turns out, HVP is a food additive used in processed foods as a flavor enhancer.  Therefore, the answer to the question of what foods contain it is basically everything, or at least most processed foods may contain it.  As for which products contain HVP from this manufacturer, the answer may disturb you:  nobody's sure.  Once it is manufactured, it is sold to distributors, wholesalers and manufacturers who then either use it or resell it again.  It's not that we can't find out what it's in, it's just that right now we don't know.

The FDA, then, was faced with a dilemma that is fairly common during the throes of a crisis.  They have some information but not complete information.  They have a difficult choice to make -- they can wait until they have complete information before issuing the recall, they can issue a recall based on the information they have and call it complete and only later acknowledge that it wasn't, or they can issue the recall with incomplete information, acknowledge that it's incomplete up front, and update it as they go.

You would be amazed how many organizations, when faced with this situation, pick one of the first two choices.  They either sit on the information they have because they're not ready to release it, or they act as though they are certain of things they are not certain of.  Later, when the whole story comes out, they are surprised when people are angry or distrusting. 

A good example of this is when there is a violent incident at a school.  Schools often don't talk to the press or to parents at all because they aren't sure, for example, how many casualties there are.  Alternately, they state with authority that there are a certain number of victims, and later have to admit that they were wrong.  Parents feel they mishandled the crisis, but in reality they may just have mishandled the information.

The FDA, in my humble opinion, has made the correct choice.  If you visit the recall page, you will see the following statement:

This list includes products subject to recall in the United States since February 2010 related to hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) paste and powder distributed by Basic Food Flavors, Inc. This list will be updated with publicly available information as received. The information is current as of the date indicated. Once included, recalls will remain listed. If we learn that any information is not accurate, we will revise the list as soon as possible. When available, this database also includes photos of recalled products that have been voluntarily submitted by recalling firms to the FDA to assist the public in identifying those products that are subject to recall.

In other words, "this is what we know so far.  It's not everything, and we'll update the information as soon as we can."

Organizations are often worried that statements like this show weakness because they show what they don't know.  I disagree.  Sharing what you do know and acknowledging what you don't is actually a very effective tool for building trust in a crisis situation.  People hearing or reading something like this feel reassured that the organization is sharing as much as it can and trying to be as accurate as possible, and that they will be told whatever is known whenever it is known.  For an organization to engender that kind of trust, whether it's about a shooting or a food additive, is a tremendous strength.

An air traffic controller and a supervisor at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport have been suspended after an incident in which the controller allowed his elementary-aged son to clear planes for take-off.  The incident occurred in mid-February, but is just coming to light now because the audio recording was posted online.  The FAA has also barred unofficial visits from family and friends in control towers until they can review their policies.

I think most of us get on an intuitive level that letting your kid direct air traffic is not a great idea.  At the same time, most of us also get a kick out of seeing kids do adult things.  This would explain the reaction of the pilots this child was talking to, who seemed to think this was rather charming.  It also seems that this was a fairly low-risk situation.  The father was telling the child what to say, and he wasn't relaying highly technical or difficult instructions.  The Associated Press quotes Dave Pasco of the website LiveATC as saying,

I absolutely believe that this is being blown out of proportion.  This is just a completely controlled situation. A child was being told exactly what to say. . . . I think it's just fantastic that this guy cared enough to take his kid to work. How many parents take their kids to work these days?

So, which is it?  Was this air traffic controller a caring father who had some harmless, educational fun with his son when he took him to work, or is he an unprofessional risk taker who put his son's fun ahead of air traffic safety?  In my humble opinion, he's actually neither, or perhaps he's both.

When something horrible happens, you've often heard me say, people's minds go to blame.  We don't like the notion that things can be random, so we look to find a preventable reason why they happen and blame the person who let that reason happen.  Now, in this instance, nothing horrible happened.  In fact, it's likely that there wasn't much of an opportunity for anything horrible to happen that would have been caused by this child or controller.

There certainly is, however, plenty of opportunity for something to go horribly wrong in general on any given day at JFK.  It's a busy airport with lots of airplanes taking off and landing.  Odds are, someday, there will be a crash at JFK simply because odds are, if there are enough planes doing enough things for enough days, something will go wrong.  On the day that that happens, if it should coincide with the day an air traffic controller had his son at the radio, it seems fairly predictable that the inevitable blame will head towards the decision to let that happen.  It won't matter that it really had nothing to do with it, because it will look like it had everything to do with it.

The AP story about this incident draws a parallel to the crash of a helicopter and a small airplane over the Hudson River in New York.  In that incident, an air traffic controller was talking on the phone with his girlfriend just before the collision.  Was it that choice to talk on the phone that was the difference between an accident and an event-free day?  It could have been.  The fact is, we'll never actually know.  But the controller's poor choice certainly made an easy place to lay blame.

There are two things that people in positions of great responsibility should try to avoid.  The first and most important is doing something completely wrong, because whatever they are responsible for will get messed up and it is likely to affect a lot of people, sometimes fatally.  The second, which is certainly less important but, from a crisis preparation standpoint, still crucial, is doing something which, should something go wrong, will look like you did something completely wrong.  That's for your own good, and it's also for the healing and recovery of everyone else.  Tragedies are hard enough without having to wrap your mind around someone doing something incredibly foolish in the midst of it.

Chelsea King will not be coming home from the jog she went on after school last Thursday.  Her body was found today in a shallow grave in Rancho Bernardo Community Park in San Diego where she went for her run.  A registered sex offender is under arrest, charged with her murder and linked to an assault on another jogger in the same park in December.

When things like this happen, you often hear people remark, "I just can't imagine what her parents must be going through."  This is undoubtedly the case.  Unless you've experienced something similar, it is unlikely that anything in your life is even vaguely related to the emotions that this family is experiencing right now. When we try to imagine what it would be like, we put ourselves directly into the worst of it -- knowing that your daughter has been raped and murdered.  But of course the family does not receive the news this way, and that is part of why we really can't imagine what it's like.

When Chelsea was later than usual coming home from her run, I imagine there was some stretch of time when no one noticed.  A minute or two late wouldn't get anyone's attention.  As time went on, and her family noticed she was late, the decision that something might be wrong probably came on gradually.  After all, if three minutes late isn't a big deal, is four?  What about five?  When do you decide it's a big deal?  Not worrying turns to worrying slowly, and there is an in-between time when folks are both worried and telling themselves they shouldn't be.

This same pattern repeats itself over and over.  There's worrying while knowing it's most likely she's fine, followed by knowing that she probably isn't fine (and the in-between time in the middle of those).  The hope that she's just injured somewhere fades into the fear that she's not, which fades into the knowledge that there's been an arrest but she might be alive, which fades into the realization that she probably isn't, which fades into the certainty.

One of the most common things people say after the traumatic death of a loved one is, "this doesn't feel real" or "this can't be true."  Part of this is because the sudden death of someone we care about is not on our mental menu for things that can happen on a normal day, so it seems like it can't possibly happen.  The other part, however, is that, at least in situations like this one, there have been so many transitions in the understanding of what is going on.  It's hardly surprising that, when it's over, it still feels like it's in that in-between place.

Chelsea King is not coming home.  Her parents know that now.  One can hardly blame them, however, if they have fleeting moments when their minds refuse to accept delivery on that particularly gruesome message.

As I write this, we are less than an hour away from a predicted tsunami hitting the islands of Hawaii.  An earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale struck off the coast of Chile last night and has sent waves as high as 8 feet across the Pacific. Hawaii is predicted to get something, although we don't know how bad it will be.  A tsunami warning has been issued, and beaches are being evacuated.  The west coast of the United States and Canada has a less dire tsunami advisory.

It has been said that the waiting is the hardest part.  In this instance, it depends very much on whether a tsunami actually hits and how big it is whether that will turn out to be true.  I can imagine this is fairly scary for small children, and depending on how well the evacuations are going, it might be pretty frightening to adults, too.  Presuming there is a tsunami, there may well be some work for CISM teams in Hawaii later this week.

Let me say that again -- Critical Incident Stress Management may well be needed later this week.  Not now.  Probably not later today.  After the tsunami hits, the damage is assessed and people can begin returning either to normal or a "new normal" it will be appropriate to address the traumatic stress.  The only thing anyone CISM trained or not should be doing for people's mental health right now is making sure they are fed and housed and that the shelter they are in is as safe as humanly possible, and then reassuring them of that.

But wait, I just said that kids in particular were probably scared.  Why shouldn't we be helping them deal with those feelings of fear?  Why shouldn't we break out the crayons and paper and start them drawing the evacuation?  Isn't early intervention a good thing?

The simple answer is that this traumatic incident isn't over.  In fact, if a tsunami does hit Hawaii, the incident has barely begun.  You can't help people process the experience of being afraid for their lives or their homes when they still have every reason to be afraid. 

CISM is designed to help people who have been traumatized, not those whose traumatization is currently in progress.  When I train school teams in CISM, I frequently tell them, "If there's a shooter in the school, I am not going to be asking you about your feelings.  I'm going to be hiding under my desk and I suggest you do the same."  Trying to process people's feelings right now is about as appropriate as going to the scene of a car accident where someone is bleeding profusely and trapped in their car and talking to them about coming to terms with their fear.  If they could deck you, they would.

In an hour or so, we'll have an idea of what Hawaii is actually dealing with.  Tomorrow I might have something to say about what CISM has to offer these folks.  For now, I just hope everyone stays safe.

Jennifer Paulson, a 30 year-old special education teacher in Tacoma, Washington was shot to death in the parking lot of Birney Elementary School as she arrived for work this morning.  The suspect was pulled over by police and opened fire some time later.  He was killed in the shootout.  The shooter was someone Paulson had worked with in college.  He started turning up at her work a few years ago and calling her 10 or 15 times a day, and she eventually got a restraining order against him.  Last Friday, he followed her in his car and was arrested for violating the order.  He spent the weekend in jail, made bail and was released on Monday.  Friday morning, Jennifer Paulson was dead.

When you hear the phrase "school shooting" you probably think of situations like Columbine, or even the hallway shooting at an Alabama middle school last month.  In our minds, violence at schools is carried out by students towards students, or by adults who are intent on harming children.  This case, like the shooting in Knoxville earlier this month and even the one in Littleton, Colorado earlier this week, paint a very different picture.

The fact is that, in any workplace including a school, the most likely person to murder another person is a current or former employee or an acquaintance or family member of a current employee.  People who open fire at schools for the most part do it for exactly the same reasons they do it in factories, office buildings and other places of business -- they are gunning for an adult who they know is there.  They are current employees who are dissatisfied and go after the boss, former employees taking out their revenge, family members commiting domestic violence homicides in public, and stalkers of all kinds, whether former love interests or people who think they should be love interests.  The biggest danger doesn't come from strangers, and it doesn't come from children.  It comes from the adults we know.

Paulson certainly was afraid for her own safety.  She had not been staying at home since the shooter was released from jail.  I don't know if she told her colleagues or her boss about this man and the restraining order.  I hope she did, but it wouldn't be unusual if she didn't.  Do you know if anyone at your work is being stalked or harassed?  Do you know if they have a restraining order against someone?  You should.

It's actually not as uncommon as you would think for schools in particular to need to deal with restraining orders and issues of people who may be a danger to the school community, but usually these take the form of orders against non-custodial parents, step-parents and former partners of parents.  From time to time a parent will come to school with a picture and a court order and tell us to call the police if the person pictured comes within a certain distance of their child.  If we're doing our job, we share that information with school staff and file it in the child's file for future reference.

It is even more common, however, for a parent who is either non-custodial or does not have physical custody of a child on a given day but has joint custody in general to turn up and pick up their child from school.  The next day, we hear from the other, very angry, parent demanding to know why we allowed this to happen.  They are always surprised to learn that we cannot enforce a custody arrangement that is not ordered by the court, nor can we enforce one that is ordered by the court if we don't have a copy.  We have no way of knowing that Tuesdays are always "mom's day" if they don't tell us.

Which brings us back to Jennifer Paulson and school employees like her.  Someone who is a threat to a teacher is a threat to that teacher's students and colleagues.  If they know where the teacher works, that is one of the easiest places to find her.  In my 19 years working in schools, however, I have only known of a restraining order involving a colleague once.  People are embarrassed to talk about people who are stalking or threatening them, particularly if it is someone they once had a relationship with.  But we can't be alert to the danger to them or to us and the children if we don't know, and it's naive to think that someone who would act so inappropriately in the first place would let a restraining order stop them if they wanted to do violence.

There is a lot of healing to be done at Birney Elementary School in the days ahead.  If Paulson hadn't told her colleagues about her stalker, they're going to have to come to terms with the question of whether they could have made a difference if she had.  We'll never know the answer to that.  Hopefully, this tragedy will encourage other women in similar situations to confide in their bosses and their colleagues, if not for their own safety then for everyone else's.

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.

A man with years of tax troubles and disputes with the IRS crashed a small plane into the building that houses the IRS office in Austin, Texas this morning.  Two people were injured and one is unaccounted for.  It's not clear from the current coverage what happened to the pilot, although it seems likely that he is dead.  Before crashing the plane, he had set fire to his home and left a six page letter/blog on the Internet explaining his actions.

Authorities have announced that this appears to be an isolated incident and that there is no ongoing threat.  The Department of Homeland Security released a statement that said,

We do not yet know the cause of the plane crash.  At this time, we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity. We continue to gather more information, and are aware there is additional information about the pilot's history.

Press coverage has also emphasized the description of this as a suicide, and most outlets are referring to his writing as a suicide note and using words like "rambling" and "incoherent" to describe it.

I find this spin absolutely fascinating.  Towards the end of his letter, the pilot wrote,

It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country. . . . I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. . . . I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored.

If you read his writing all the way through (you can download it here), you will disagree with his conclusions but you will not find it hard to understand at all.  It is not incoherent.  He is very clear that he is angry at the government, why he is angry at the government, and that he is about to do this to draw attention to his grievances, cause other people to pay attention to his thinking and inspire others to also kill themselves in similar attacks.

Let's suppose you didn't know anything about this story.  Suppose someone told you that a man, angry at the United States government and believing that its citizens should rise up against it, killed himself by flying an airplane into a building housing a government office.  He left behind writing detailing his belief that the government is corrupt and encouraging others to similarly die for the cause of freedom.  What is your mental image?  Mine is not of a computer engineer.  It's of a terrorist.

So why does DHS say this isn't terrorism?  And why is the media reporting it as an incoherent suicide?  Why does it seem so important to portray this person as crazy, while others, such as the Fort Hood shooter, are terrorists? 

The practical difference is that this man has no links to any organized group that anyone can tell.  When DHS says this isn't terrorism, they really mean this isn't organized terrorism, and they are right.  There is also, frankly, and element of religious and/or racial profiling.  Terrorists are Muslim and come from the Middle East, southern Asia or Northern Africa.  Americans can't be terrorists.

The other reason it's important to us to maintain this distinction, however, is that it makes us feel safe.  We have an image of terrorists that is truly frightening and represents an ongoing danger.  The thing that keeps us from being scared out of our minds is that, for the most part, we believe them to be "over there" and not here.  Those who may be here fit a certain profile and hence are easy to catch.

This pilot, on the other hand, isn't "over there."  If he's a terrorist, then there's a much greater risk of terrorism than we would like to think about.  There is no way to keep them out, because they're already in, and there is no way to figure out who they are.  So we tell ourselves that this guy was crazy and suicidal.  We know such people exist, and even that there is some danger from them, but they don't represent anything near the threat that terrorists do.  They are isolated incidents.

A certain amount of psychological self-preservation is a reasonable thing.  We do all sorts of things to prevent ourselves from being paralyzed by fear, and that is what allows us to function.  Sometimes, however, it pays to take a step back and ask whether we are protecting ourselves from fear or simply being oblivious to the truth.

Last week, ABC News released 12 photographs that were among the thousands they received in response to a Freedom of Information Act Request for pictures of the collapse of the World Trade Center.  These images, which had never been released before, were taken on September 11, 2001 from a New York Police Department helicopter.

These new images have a huge amount of power.  They are sharp and clear, and offer a new angle -- from above.  They are good photography by any standard.  As you flip through them, it is like using an old-fashioned animation flip book.  In time lapse animation, we see the towers come down.  From a dispassionate standpoint, it looks pretty cool.  Then you remember that this isn't a movie, or a planned building implosion, but an occupied building, and it isn't cool anymore.

There isn't an adult in American who hasn't seen pictures or video of the collapse before.  On some level, we think we're "over it," some more than others.  Yet there is something compelling and awful about these new pictures.  Maybe it's the new angle, maybe it's the clear sequencing, but these pictures put me back to that day more than 9 years ago in a way that little else has.  Perhaps because they are so dispassionate, they refocus the viewer on the facts -- not the politics or even the fear or anger.

I have not chosen to post any of the pictures in this space because I want you to have control over whether and when you look at them.  If you haven't yet, however, I would encourage you to.  They aren't gory, but they do pack a wallop.  If you want to understand what happened that day, I think you need to see these.  You can view them here.

Nodar Kumaritashvili, an Olympic luger from the country of Georgia, died today after crashing during a training run in Vancouver.  He was 21.  He is the fourth athlete and only the second luger to die at a Winter Olympics.  The most recent death prior to his was in 1992 when a skiier crashed into snow grooming equipment.

If you've ever watched the luge on television, it has probably crossed your mind that there is something fairly crazy about it.  Lugers hurtle down an ice-covered track at speeds up to 90 miles per hour, on their backs.  The track twists and turns and they have to steer, although they cannot see where they are going.  This is a trade-off, in some sense, with the skeleton, in which the athletes are on their stomach and can see where they are going, but are going head first, which may or may not seem even more insane to you.

Crazy or not, there are hundreds of athletes preparing to race in the luge in Vancouver.  The men's luge is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.  If that schedule holds, it means that athletes will be sliding down the same course where Kumaritashvili died, doing exactly what he was doing when he died, just about a day after the accident.  That's awfully soon.

The effort to come to grips with this tragedy is already evident among lugers from other countries and in the press coverage of this incident.  The two main themes of this seem to be a) that the track itself is unusually dangerous and that b) Kumaritashvili was not one of the best lugers.  Choosing one or both of these themes as they process his death will have a big impact on what competing again means to these athletes.

If the track itself was unsafe, then lugers are blaming the officials in Vancouver.  There have been previous warnings and complaints, but nothing was done, and now a man is dead.  This is a relatively easy way to lay blame for Kumaritashvili's death, but it brings with it some problems.  First of all, blame is never a particularly useful tool in processing a trauma.  Assigning blame does not actually change the fact that someone is dead, and when that truth settles in all the work of dealing with that still has to happen.  Secondly, if the track is to blame, that implies that these athletes are themselves in danger.

On the other hand, if Kumaritashvili made a mistake, then lugers can tell themselves that they are better than that.  That makes it easier for them to get on the track tomorrow.  But if they knew and liked Kumaritashvili, it's pretty painful to blame him for his own death.  As much as blame isn't very useful, blaming the dead person is even less so, because you have no hope that that blame will result in a change.  The officials might fix the track.  Kumaritashvili can't un-crash his sled.

It's not unusual, after something horrible has happened, for people to want to avoid the place where it occurred, at least for a while.  For a few days or weeks, people take alternate routes in their cars after an accident or cross the street to be away from a house where a murder occurred.  I usually tell people that as long as they are still willing to go out, that fear is typical and will diminish.  Unfortunately, in this instance, the equivalent of taking an alternate route would be not competing in the Olympics, and that is also the equivalent of not going out.  I don't know how many, if any, athletes will make that choice.  But I do know that most, if not all of them, will feel at least a little distracted going down that track tomorrow.

The United States Federal Government is shut down for the third straight day today due to snow.  Washington, DC is often the butt of jokes when it snows.  They always seem surprised and completely unable to cope with even minor snowfall.  Shortly after President Obama took office he expressed great surprised that his daughters' school had closed due to "a little ice."  In short, people in the Northeast and Upper Mid-west tend to think that people in Washington are snow wimps.

Today, Washington is in the grips of the second huge snow storm of the week.  This is, by any measure, an actually large storm, not just a Washington-is-hysterical storm.  They're getting up to 16 inches on top of a couple of feet they got over the weekend.  In addition, there are high winds, making this not just a storm but a blizzard.  In response, among other things, Washington declared that it was too dangerous for plows to be on the roads this morning, and halted snow removal.

Growing up, as I did, in New England, my first reaction was to use this news as more affirmation that Washington just doesn't know how to deal with snow.  I certainly cannot remember a time when plows in Boston, Pittsburgh or Ann Arbor (the three areas where I've lived the longest) were told to stand down because it was too dangerous.  It becomes a point of pride for people from highly snowy areas that "a little snow" doesn't stop us.  How can it be too dangerous to plow?

This is really not very fair to Washington for two reasons.  The first is that this is, objectively, a pretty bad storm.  Washington is not the only jurisdiction to have pulled over its plows today.  The fact that I don't remember this happening where I was living doesn't mean it didn't, and it certainly doesn't mean it wouldn't if this same storm happened to hit literally close to home.  I can certainly remember storms where there was concern that there was literally no place to put plowed snow, and ones where the snow was so deep that plows could not easily navigate through it.

The other reason is more complicated.  The public works department of every city has to decide whether it is safe to send out their plows.  For most storms, regardless of where you live, this is pretty straightforward.  It's unlikely, however, that this is the only storm in the history of the country to at least spur the conversation about whether it is too windy to plow.  Part of this decision does have to do with how used to snow the jurisdiction is.  What seems like a "bad storm" in Washington is not necessarily a bad storm in New Hampshire.  But there's more to it than that.

In every jurisdiction, when they make the decision about whether to send out the plows, they also have to take into consideration that not sending out the plows will have a serious impact on the residents.  Being stuck at home during a snow storm isn't just an issue of closing schools, it's also an issue of public safety.  The longer folks are snowed in, the more likely there are to be medical emergencies, and those emergencies will have trouble getting to the hospital.  If this is a one-time, unusual instance, it may well be a risk worth taking given the risk of sending out the plows. 

If you live someplace where you are making this decision not twice a year but two or three times a week throughout the winter months, however, your decision is never truly an isolated one.  If you decide not to send out the plows today, you are also setting the precedent that you will not send out the plows anytime there is a storm like this one.  That's fine if the storm really is an unusual event, but if it's going to happen a lot there's going to be a problem.  Washington can afford to shut down for a week.  If Boston does, it's running the risk that that week will keep coming, week after week.

So, does that mean that Washingtonians really aren't snow wimps?  Probably not.  It does mean, however, that today isn't necessarily and example of it.  Everyone has to assess whether risks are worth it every day.  It's OK for us to come up with different answers.

Last week, after a 9th grader shot another in the back of the head in Madison, Alabama, the mayor of Madison urged people to pray for the victim and the students at the school.  Local churches sent counselors.  The city and the school system worked with local clergy as well as crisis responders to provide support for those affected. 

To some extent, there is a great divide in this country with regards to the role of churches and clergy in situations like this one.  In the South, in poorer communities, and in heavily African-American communities you are much more likely to see churches stepping up to offer support.  In the North, particularly in affluent northern White communities, this is less common.  Where you fall in these groupings probably has a lot to do with how you feel about this practice. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I am White and have only worked in northern schools, although of varying degrees of poverty and varying racial demographics. So, do I think this is a good idea?  Like most things, it depends.  But I certainly think it can be if it's done well. 

The potential problem, of course, comes in trying to do an effective job of meeting people's spiritual needs in a public school setting.  I say it's a potential problem because I have seen it done both really well and really poorly.  I think we can all imagine what doing it poorly might look like.  Students come for counseling and are greeted by someone who tells them the deceased is going to hell, or to heaven, or that they should adopt that person's faith to find comfort.  Not only is this bad from a constitutional standpoint, it's not good crisis response.  This is not a good time to proselytize, and offering simple platitudes often turns out to be much less comforting than people think.

When this sort of work is done well, it is done by lay or clergy-people who have been specially trained both as chaplains and as crisis responders.  They understand the psychological process that people are going through as well as the spiritual need.  A good chaplain will follow the lead of the person they are talking to in exploring the role of faith in their thinking.  They will answer questions about God with questions about what the person themself believes.  They will offer prayer only when asked, and yes, they will be asked.  It is this training that allows chaplains of one denomination to serve in the military, hospitals or prisons and assist people with a wide array of beliefs.  They are not faith dictators, they are faith facilitators.
Every community and every culture in the world has particular expectations for the role of religion and the clergy in their lives.  If, as seems likely, that role is very prominent in Madison, Alabama, it would be wrong not to involve the religious community in supporting the children.  Furthermore, people who have experienced trauma often find themselves with strong spiritual needs, either because they want comfort or because they have serious spiritual or theological questions.  A good chaplain can help with that.  As with anything in a crisis, however, it's important that everyone knows exactly what their job is and how to do it, and sticks to that.

There was a massive explosion at a Kleen Energy Services gas power plant under construction in Middletown, Connecticut at about 11 o'clock this morning.  Most recent reports suggest a gas leak may have been the cause, and that there were about 50 people working at the plant at the time.  Police officials said that this was a "mass casualty event."

If you don't do this sort of thing for a living, the term "mass casualty event" probably sounds pretty bad.  It probably sounds pretty bad if you do do this sort of thing for a living, too, but in a different way.  Most of us, when we hear "casualty" think "death," but of course that's incorrect.  Casualties include people who have been injured as well as people who have been killed.  A mass casualty event (MCE) is an incident that is of sufficient size that it will stress the first response and health-care system locally.  Different jurisdictions define how big something has to be to qualify as an MCE, and that also takes into account the capabilities of local responders.

Local hospitals in and around Middletown are reported to have activated their disaster plans.  On the face of it, this may sound odd.  We think of disasters as being earthquakes, tornadoes, floods and the like.  For the purposes of responding to them, however, there really isn't a big difference between a massive accident and a massive tornado.  If you work in the ER, you don't particularly care how all these people got hurt, but just that they did and how many of them there will be.  A disaster plan enables the hospital (or whoever) to plan for a situation that is going to tax their capacity.  It defines who does what when it's "all hands on deck."

Being injured in a mass casualty event as well as responding to one can have slightly different stressors.  The biggest difference that most people notice right away is the use of triage.  Responders have to choose who will get care first, and that means some people are going to have to wait.  If you are injured when your car hits a tree, for example, you are going to get the full attention of first responders.  If you are in a 50 car pileup, you will only get first attention if you are the most injured person that rescuers think has a chance of survival.  Anyone who has ever gone to the emergency room on a busy day has experienced triage.  You may be having the worst emergency of your life, but as long as someone else is having a worse one, you have to wait.

The triage involved in MCE's can become a predictable theme when responders and survivors work with crisis intervention personnel.  Survivors express the fear and frustration of being seriously injured and having first responders walk right by them without helping.  Responders report the horror of seeing multiple people in serious pain and having to leave them as they are rather than help.  There is nothing quite like having to step over a dying person without offering even comfort in order to save someone else.  These are choices none of us, even the highly trained, are used to making.

It will be a while before we know the full extent of the injuries at Kleen Energy.  That's also one of the hallmarks of an MCE -- helping comes before counting the people who need help.  As the dust begins to settle, this will be a big job for a CISM team, who will need to move in and help everyone recover from the difficult choices that had to be made today.

At about 1:45 this afternoon, a 9th grader at Discovery Middle School in Madison, Alabama pulled out a gun in the middle of a crowded hallway and shot fellow 9th grader Todd Brown in the head.  Brown is in critical condition, and the other student is in custody.  No information about a possible motive has been released.  The news coverage of this event provides an interesting view into how schools respond in a crisis and how things actually unfold.  It is also notable for what is missing from the coverage.

From the reporting, we can gather the following:  When the shooting occurred, other students ran into nearby classrooms.  At least one of those classrooms had a substitute teacher who did not have keys to lock the door.  I can say as an administrator that this is a real problem in schools.  Ideally, everyone who unlocks a classroom door, whether the regular teacher, the sub using a borrowed key, the custodian or anyone else, ought to leave the door so that it locks when it is closed.  However, few people do because they don't remember, don't think it's important, and students and colleagues can't come and go from the classroom if the door is closed without the teacher having to constantly let people in.

After the crowd scattered, the school went into lockdown.  The purpose of this is twofold -- to make sure that everyone is accounted for and the shooter has limited access to other victims, and to keep people out of the way of emergency personnel.  Few people think of it, but you might well put a school into lockdown if a child had a medical emergency in the hallway, too.  The school nurse and the school resource officer (a police officer stationed in the school) were there within seconds.  Emergency personnel were on scene within 3 minutes of the shot, which is one of the advantages of a school being directly across the street from a fire station. 

By this point, the kids who were in the classrooms were already texting each other to find out what everyone knew about what had happened.  They were also texting their parents, who can be seen in the news photo above waiting anxiously outside the school.  The days when information control was in the hands of the person who had access to the PA system are long gone.  The school was able to start releasing students approximately half an hour after the shooting, which is phenomenally fast and speaks to the efficiency with which everyone involved was working.

Here's what isn't in the coverage, but what is almost certainly true.  The shooter almost certainly has a disciplinary record, a truancy record or had already come to the attention of the administration.  If his target was not chosen at random, then chances are the victim also has a backstory.  In my experience, when horrible things happen involving kids, no matter how random it may seem, there is a 9 out of 10 chance that there is something about the child, their family, history or background that makes the situation less simple than it appears.

Also, unless the victim was chosen at random, many people at the school know what the motive was.  The fact that it's not being reported doesn't mean no one knows, it means they've been told not to tell.  There is no way this happened in a crowded hallway between two students who knew each other without either a witness or someone else connected to the people involved knowing why this happened.

The Principal at Discovery Middle School, any other administrators, and the counselors or other crisis team members have had a terrible day.  Chances are good that, while they have been busy setting up counseling for the students, no one has yet checked in on how they themselves are doing.  Chances are also good that they are not cutting themselves any slack or making sure that they take care of themselves.  This is the nature of this type of incident and of people in this kind of position.  We are trained to care for kids, but we're horrible at caring for ourselves and each other.

Even if the administrators and crisis responders are getting a little TLC, there's about a 85% chance that no one has looked in on the secretary, or even noticed what her day was like.  She spent the afternoon fielding panicked phone calls, fearing for her own safety and getting barked at by just about everyone.  She had a lot of the responsibility of coordinating the situation, but probably much less information or control than her superiors.  If there was a staff meeting to discuss the days' events, she probably was not invited.

Obviously I am speculating about the shooter, the victim and the staff at the school.  I have no actual information.  For all I know, these folks were just as well prepared for the aftermath of the day as they were for the immediate response.  What I can say is that if that is true, it is unusual.  Unless you've had the misfortune to go through something like this several times, there are lessons that you just haven't learned yet.  It's unfortunate that anyone has to learn them at all.

Update:  The victim, Todd Brown, died on Friday evening at about 8 PM.  The shooter has been charged with murder.