Of course we’ve changed.
In the weeks leading up to the five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. various media outlets have pontificated on the aftermath of Sept. 11. U.S News and World Report examined what we’ve learned; Time, what we’ve lost. Yet the journal Foreign Policy skipped the introspection and proclaimed Sept. 11 “The Day Nothing Much Changed.”
Viewed through an international affairs lens, perhaps that’s true. The Taliban still patrols portions of Afghanistan; the Middle East is still smoldering, Osama bin Laden is still missing. There is rampant anti-Americanism worldwide, but that was true long before the Bush administration removed Saddam Hussein (plans for which were drawn up long before that tragic Tuesday).
From a personal perspective, though, Sept. 11 deeply affected each of us. Wherever you were five years ago today – whether you were working on the campus or sitting in middle or high school – you stopped and wondered what in the world was going on.
Nothing in the past had foreshadowed such an immense attack. The present was utterly flabbergasting. And in the immediate hours after the attack, we didn’t know if there was a future, let alone what it held for us.
Now we know, of course, that life goes on. Like recovering from a deep wound, we walked scarred, but we walked on.
“In some form or another, people were dealing with [post-traumatic stress disorder] effect,” said Dr. Jonathan Kandell, a psychologist who heads the university’s Counseling Service. “It wears off after a while, it just settles into some type of normalcy. But what normal is now I’m sure is different than what it was on Sept. 10, 2001.”
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As coordinator of the university’s post-Sept. 11 counseling efforts, Kandell intimately witnessed the university community’s reaction to the attacks. That fall, 20 percent more students visited the Counseling Center. While some were New York natives who felt direct effects, most were people whose long-standing problems were made more acute by the attacks.
“Whatever their issues were became exacerbated by the tragedy,” he said.
The center’s numbers returned to typical levels the following spring and – besides a post-Hurricane Katrina rise last year – have remained so since, he said. Such scenes of escalation, reflection and settling have abounded on the campus, evidence of Americans’ resoluteness and obedience to their leaders’ pleas to return to their routines.
The Study Abroad Office, for example, saw Sept. 11 stymie six consecutive years of increased numbers of students spending a semester overseas. After climbing from 338 students during the 1995-1996 school year to 806 in 2000-2001, the number of students studying abroad fell to 737 in 2001-2002, a trend seen nationwide, said Rebecca Schedel, an adviser in the Study Abroad Office. But 893 students went abroad in 2002-2003, and last year 1,333 traveled.
From 2000 to 2005, the annual Freshman Survey, conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, found more college students interested in keeping up-to-date with political affairs (from 28.1 percent to 36.4 percent) as well as influencing the political structure (17.6 percent to 21.8 percent).
“The interest in the news led to a lot of young people voting in the election in 2004,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, research director for the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. “Voter turnout was way up in 2004 relative to 2000.”
Just because college-age students are becoming more politically aware does not mean they like what they are seeing. In early October, CIRCLE will release a survey that shows an increasingly high level of dissatisfaction among young people with their government, said Executive Director Peter Levine. A majority of the demographic gives at least some credence to a Sept. 11 conspiracy, according to a recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.
The idea that the federal government was complicit in Sept. 11 is also widely accepted overseas, as freshman biochemistry major Sarim Baig found when he went to visit relatives in Pakistan following the attacks.
“A few of them don’t really believe it was people from Saudi Arabia,” Baig said. “You hear stuff like the CIA did it. They don’t really trust the American media.”
The widespread belief in conspiracy theories shouldn’t be seen as surprising. Doggedly questioning the government’s role in the Sept. 11 attacks is as American as slapping a magnetic ribbon onto your car and letting the matter rest.
Shannon Gundy can testify to the fleeting nature of the tragedy. As associate director of undergraduate admissions, she read scores of Sept. 11-themed application essays in the initial aftermath.
These days, though, things have changed.
“I think people have very short-term memories,” she said. “I don’t remember the last time I read an essay on 9/11.”
While students may have stopped writing about the topic, they have not stopped thinking about it. The attacks have planted an unwelcome sense of suspicion.
Since Sept. 11, the Bush administration and the Supreme Court have tried to determine the proper balance between protecting civil liberties while enhancing security.
Overall, the nation seems to reflect the attitude of junior biology major Marvin Webster: “I’d rather be safe than sorry, right?”
Few on the campus are more intimate with these issues than Dr. Jacques Gansler, the vice president of research. From 1997 to January 2001, he served as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition directly opposite the side of the Pentagon that was hit five years ago today.
“We predicted this. … We had expected terrorist actions,” he said. “It was a question of when, not if, and a question of how, not a question of will. That still is expected.”
Though he was not shocked by the attack, Gansler said he could see how others were taken aback.
“It clearly had a very big impact on the psyche of Americans because they didn’t worry about airplanes as missiles or terrorists coming to America,” he said.
The question now is how large an impact Sept. 11 had on that psyche.
“Whether it’s been a long-lasting change is hard to tell,” Kandell, the psychologist, said. “Over a period of time, it becomes normal.”
Contact reporter Brendan Lowe at lowedbk@gmail.com.
This is one of three articles under the title “9/11 HOW WE’VE CHANGED”. The other two articles are: “9/11 HOW WE’VE CHANGED_Academics” and “9/11 HOW WE’VE CHANGED_Students”
