9/11: Life Outside the Bull's-Eye

To tourists, Brownsville, Vt., is a ski destination, owing to the presence of Mt. Ascutney, but to residents, it's horse country. Talk at the lunch counter of the Brownsville General Store usually revolves around horses, but sometimes strays to the latest doings of children and grandchildren, as patrons wolf down the daily special, served hot off an old cast iron stove.

It would be strange indeed if conversation were to dwell on the headlines of the many regional newspapers stacked by the door: "Bin Laden Said to Be Organizing for a U.S. Attack," "Analysts Warn of Small-Plane Terrorism Threat," "2 Charged With Plotting to Bomb Train Station."

The likelihood of terrorists striking here is, one might even say without knocking on wood, nil. Yet the threat of terrorism affects everyone somehow, even those who live outside the bull's-eye.

Before I moved up here, I was often able to forget about terrorism. Just as often, however, the threat gnawed at my nerves, especially when I navigated the throngs of pedestrians around Rockefeller Center, or whenever the subway suddenly ground to a halt mid-tunnel. It was also difficult to look out the window of my Brooklyn apartment at the empty patch of sky where the Trade Center towers once stood, or on bright mornings, not to recall the snow of ash and spindrift papers that fell on my street, and then to avoid a lapse into imagining where my wife, whose office was in lower Manhattan, would have been had she left a bit earlier for work that morning.

Far removed from that now, I'm like most Americans in not fearing direct injury by a terrorist act. In an Aug. 17 Gallup Poll, two-thirds of Americans surveyed said they were "not too worried" or "not worried at all" that they might fall victim to terrorism. The fears I had in New York have faded to a vague sense of unease about the future, which I suspect I share with many others, too.

"The threat of terrorism is more immediate if you were close to it," says Robert Jay Lifton, MD, distinguished professor emeritus of the City University of New York and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard University. But the continuing "war on terror" is covered nationwide. "It keeps anxiety active, or even overactive," he says.

If you don't have much cause to worry about being blown up, gassed, or irradiated by terrorists, the possible threat to your livelihood and savings may be enough to keep you generally on edge.

Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs after Sept. 11, 2001. What's more, about 60% of American families are invested in the stock market. If the other shoe drops, reverberations will show on the ticker. In a recent survey of National Association for Business Economics members, 40% said they thought that terrorism poses the greatest short-term risk to the U.S. economy.

Older Americans who remember it, and younger ones who are historically minded may fear, ultimately, that more terrorist attacks could plunge us into another Great Depression, or at least a deep recession. "The model of the Depression looms somewhere in the background," Lifton says.