Shockwaves: America Picks Up the Pieces

Amidst all our brave talk about "getting back to normal," there’s a pervasive sense that we’ve lost track of what exactly "normal" might be. Is it normal to stay up all night, wracked by fears of another deadly attack? Is it okay to cry in your car while you’re stopped at a red light, because it’s the only time and place you have time to sit and grieve? Is it acceptable to celebrate, to go on with a long-planned birthday party, christening, bat mitzvah?

If you’ve got answers, please let us know — there are a lot of Americans who are trying to adjust to a metamorphosed world, finding it difficult to fit ideas of life before to the reality of life after. How far does normal life bend, anyway, before it breaks into unrecognizable pieces?

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Public life

We are, suddenly, a skittish country of post-traumatic stress, shaken from what so recently seemed an unshakable bravura. Postings culled from websites (including this one) and newspapers’ letters to the editor show a populace ready to spring into some yet to be determined course of action. What form that action takes has already become a potent point of debate. We want revenge, but we are torn by the idea of war — each "bomb the suckers back to the stone ages" email follows hard on the heels of melodramatic pleas to "let there be peace on earth."

Anecdotal evidence suggests America’s doctors have been busy this past week, especially in New York and Washington, D.C. Physicians report liberal dispensation of sleeping pills and an upswing in requests for emergency psychotherapy sessions. New York City’s major hospitals opened free social work clinics to deal with the influx of grief-stricken and traumatized people into their emergency rooms.

The horror of last week has had widespread effects: A poll of 1,200 adults by the Pew Research Center indicates that as many as 80 percent of adult women are feeling "depressed" following last Tuesday’s attacks. Pollsters also found that city dwellers along both coasts report a greater incidence of sleeplessness than their Midwestern peers.

Our pastimes

Baseball, football, golf and even Michael Jordan sat out last week, sensing that perhaps whatever comfort sports may bring us was not adequate in the wake of spectacular disaster. The players are back in action as of Monday, participants clad in newly flag-dotted uniforms. Sporting events are drawing Americans together, our games suddenly less about individual egos than about serving their original purpose — giving us all a chance to sing the national anthem, chat with our neighbors and watch our peacetime heroes.

Stripped of their earth-shaking significance, and losing their weeklong taint of guilt, sporting events (and movies, and non-news television) once again serve as no more than pleasant diversions. That’s a pretty big deal these days, of course: Always a country of escapists, America is desperate for a chance to hide from our own thoughts for a while.