When the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, even defense experts thought it was just a tragic accident.
Fourteen years later, when people hear about a shooting, a train accident or an explosion, they assume it’s an act of terrorism until proven otherwise.
This fundamental shift in America’s collective mindset, the notion that we are no longer invincible, makes us harder to attack, experts say.
Because Americans now default to terrorism when something goes wrong, future attackers have lost their ability to catch people off guard, said Nora Bensahel, a distinguished scholar in residence at American University.
“It was inconceivable to most people on the morning of 9/11 that a group of 19 men could commandeer airplanes and turn them into missiles,” she said. “We as a society didn’t see ourselves as vulnerable.
“That would not be true today. If one plane went into a building today, the first thought is ‘we’re under attack.’ ”
She pointed to the quick actions of the three Americans and one British man who stopped a gunman from a massacre on a Paris-bound train last month, saying that “they figured out what was going on really fast.
“I think there was a general sense of surprise and invincibility that we all lost on Sept. 11. It’s going to be a lot harder to surprise Americans.”
As a result, terrorists will need to find more creative ways to attack and cannot rely on the element of surprise as they once did.
Americans are also more alert to threats than they were in the “naïve” days before 9/11, said Arie Kruglanski, a distinguished university professor in psychology at the University of Maryland.
“We lived in a Garden of Eden Pleasantville where everything was simple,” he said. “All of this has dramatically changed, not only by 9/11 but in the aftermath where it became clear to us that we do not have control and that military might is not going to dismantle and demolish the terrorist organizations.”
Increased bystander vigilance in the age of “see something, say something” means Americans are always on the look out for threats, such as an abandoned bag or a suspicious package.
A vendor, for example, thwarted the attempted Times Square car bombing in 2010 after noticing smoke coming out of the vehicle, according to news reports. The vendor probably wouldn’t have looked for something like that before 9/11, said Kruglanski, cofounder of the National Institute for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism.
Terrorists have also lost some of their ability to cause extreme anxiety and, as more time passes since 9/11, Americans are no longer altering their lives to avoid an attack, said Anne Speckhard, an expert in the psychology of terrorism.
In the months and early years following the attack, Americans participated in a lot of avoidance behavior. Speckhard said her friends in Wisconsin wouldn’t go to their local shopping mall for fear of a terrorist attack.
As time goes on and attacks occur with some regularity, however, people have become desensitized to the danger. And that’s a good thing, Speckhard said, because it deprives terrorists of what they want — getting into the heads of Westerners and making them afraid to live their every day lives.
“I think people have gotten more used to terrorism as a part of life now, just like car accidents are a part of life,” said Speckhard, the author of Bride of ISIS. “I get in my car every day and know people can kill me. I still drive. I don’t engage in avoidant behavior.”
It’s one of the things she tried to emphasize while doing stress debriefings in the days after 9/11 to personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Belgium, where her husband served as the ambassador in 2001. She said she asked people if they had eaten from the lunch buffet, if they had crossed the street, if they were sitting under the chandelier and then asked if they were afraid of those things to try to put fear of terrorism in perspective.
She said many of the warnings that came out in the days around 9/11 were not useful and just fed into people’s anxieties, but that it’s a very normal response, pointing also to weather events and lots of stress leading up to a storm after a very destructive hurricane, for example.
“That’s human. We’re supposed to learn from things that hurt us so we don’t repeat them,” she said. “Anything that shows a potential for serious harm is going to get our attention if it’s put in front of us.”
In teaching classes at American University, Bensahel has seen how those too young to remember 9/11 react to terrorism in the world around them. While the students are influenced by the decade-plus of war that followed, and are just as likely to quickly label an act of violence as terrorism, they’re missing a personal connection to the attacks and “don’t remember the terror we all felt,” she said.
“It doesn’t resonate in quite the same personal way. I will never forget where I was on Sept. 11, it shapes you personally in a way.”
In the 14 years since the towers fell and the Pentagon burned, enough time has passed that the deadliest attack on American soil is beginning to be just something in history books, not an event where people remember watching an endless loop of destruction in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
“It’s still a hugely important turning point in American history that has huge consequences, but it’s a historical event rather than something people feel viscerally, and that’s normal,” Bensahel said. “We’re far enough away now that that’s starting to happen.”
This article appears in the Sept. 8 edition of the Washington Examiner magazine.
