Is Fear the New Norm? UMass Dartmouth Professor Weighs In [incl. Brian Glyn Williams]

Professors, experts discuss the lasting impact of 9/11

What had been unthinkable — that terrorists could kill thousands of Americans on American soil — became a reality on 9/11, and suddenly it appeared attacks could happen in nearly any crowded space, at any time. Americans were confronted with a sense of fear and the unknown unlike nearly anything Americans had experienced before.

A decade after the 9/11 attacks, the fear that Americans felt then — that another attack was imminent — has largely dissipated, but it still has a strong impact on both the United States and the world, according to sociologists.

“There are relatively few very transformative events that shape how generations conceptualize themselves, and this is one of them,” said Andrew J. Perrin, an associate chair of the University of North Carolina’s sociology department and an author of several articles related to 9/11.

Perrin said he’s not surprised that the attacks a decade ago would still play such a big role in American society: it had a tremendous impact on culture, its been used by both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations to their political advantage, and has shifted political discourse in a more authoritarian direction.

Brian Glyn Williams, a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth history professor who specializes in Middle Eastern studies, particularly al-Qaida and the Taliban, said 9/11 shocked Americans by showing that the nation was vulnerable. “It wasn’t supposed to happen here. Not in America,” he said.

Not since the Red Scare, a period of anti-Communism after World War I, was there such a great sense of fear among Americans, Williams said. That level of fear isn’t the same today as it was then, and it won’t be reached again, he said, because America will never have the same isolation it felt before the attacks. So many Americans don’t travel abroad, “the world is a frieghtening place” to many, Williams said.

Post-9/11 fear cuts both ways, too, Williams said. Just as many Americans have a fear of Islam, “we have frieghtened the Muslim world” too, he said. The popularity America enjoyed after the attacks quickly went away when the United States invaded Iraq, something for which few could see a rationale.

“Iraq was a real eye-opener for many Muslims,” Williams said.

The American response to the attacks was only going to encourage the enemy, said Yale Magrass, a UMass Dartmouth sociologist. The thought among terrorists and their sympathizers was, “See, America is out to get the world like we say it is,” he said.

ROLE OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

Numerous sociologists said fear of terrorism has stayed with many Americans at least partly because of the way the media has portrayed the attacks and the way politicians — especially the Bush administration — seemed to use fear to their advantage.

Brian Monahan, a sociology professor at Iowa State University, wrote a book that looked into the way the media covered 9/11 and how the attacks became such a powerful symbol. Too much of the media covered the attacks in a narrow way that confined understanding largely to victimization and heroism, he said.

Coverage was “a major simplification of what happened,” Monahan said, and hasn’t helped Americans to fully understand what happened on that day. The subject will likely stay in the news after the 10th anniversary and could become a key part of the 2012 presidential election, he said.

Monahan also sees the attacks as what he called “a moral shock.”

The way people understood the world was so broken that day, he said, that many could only compare it to something they would see in a movie.

People are afraid of other attacks partly because of the Bush admininstration’s playing up the risk of another attack as a way to justify invading Afghanistan and especially Iraq, Magrass said. The Barack Obama administration hasn’t backed away from keeping a presence of fear among Americans either, he said.

“Frankly, I think they’re afraid of being labeled soft” if the administration doesn’t talk about the risk of terrorist attacks, Magrass said.

Magrass said he also found a few things surprising in the wake of 9/11: that there wasn’t a greater anti-war movement, that al-Qaida would have other attacks and that American invasion in the Middle East would encourage more aggressive responses from terrorists.

The attacks will stay in the public spotlight through the 2012 presidential elections, the sociologists said. American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq continues to be debated along with the economy among Republican presidential candidates seeking to challenge Obama.

POLLS SHOW WANING FEAR

Various surveys show that Americans might still be worried to some extent about an attack, but not nearly as much as before.

A national New York Times/CBS News poll found that 42 percent of Americans thought another attack in the United States was likely in the next few months, down from 59 percent five years earlier. In Massachusetts, 40 percent of those polled by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center said they thought the U.S. was at a higher risk of attack compared to 2001. Five years prior, 53 percent said they felt there was a higher risk.

In the same UNH poll, 16 percent thought greater Boston was more vulnerable to an attack than in 2001 — the same amount that said the region was less vulnerable. In 2006, 24 percent thought the area was more vulnerable to an attack.

Even incidents since 9/11 don’t appear to have a significant impact. In a Gallup poll taken weeks after an attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day 2009, respondents actually were less likely to feel “very worried” about an attack than before the incident. Roughly the same about — around one-third — said they were “not too worried” about an attack both before and after the attempted bombing.

And among those 18 to 29 years old, more than 70 percent said they were eitiher “not too worried” or “not worried at all” that they or someone in their family would be a victim of terrorism, a poll by American University found earlier this year.

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