Bomb May Fracture Our Trust

It has happened to Jerusalem, to Beirut, to Belfast and London. And now it is happening to us.

The count of victims of the Oklahoma City bombing officially stood at 31 Wednesday evening, with many more deaths expected. And experts on the mass psychology of terrorism warn that the whole country has been victimized, and is headed for a painful bout of survivors’ syndrome.

The experts call it “homicide bereavement” on a grand scale. For the Oklahoma City survivors and their loved ones, it differs from normal grief in bringing a more extreme terror, anger and loss of faith, said a Washington psychiatrist, Stefan Pasternack, who has treated terrorism victims in Israel, England and the United States.

For the rest of us, it is the same - sometimes less overwhelming, sometimes more, depending on our experiences. And for nations, it often brings bouts of hostility to foreigners, crackdowns on freedom of movement and basic liberty, and political turmoil.

“We all will be anxious after this,” said Bertram S. Brown, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. “With the World Trade Center and now this, we no longer are an invulnerable country.”

Brown has just returned from Japan, where he observed police making widespread searches and arrests with full public support in the wake of a terrorist poison gas attack in a Tokyo subway station. The same thing has happened for decades in Israel, and even, at times, in Britain, and Brown fears it will happen in this country too.

“When the anxiety gets high enough, we will have our civil liberties in danger,” he said.

There will be changes in our public life, said Amitai Etzioni, a George Washington University sociology professor who specializes in the study of communities.

We may accustom ourselves, as the British and Israelis have, to bomb-sniffing dogs in the lobbies of our public buildings, to excruciatingly diligent searches of our clothing and packages, to schoolroom lessons that teach our children to run for help when they see a paper bag on a bus bench with no one nearby. At home and in our government buildings, we will certainly be spending more for a sense of safety.

“We are going to tighten and add measures of security,” Etzioni said. “We see communities building walls around them. We have a million private guards because we cannot rely on the police. From the White House to the courthouse, we have these peculiar flower pots which are really cement barriers.”

“It’s a very sad commentary, but very real,” he said. “The feelings that people have that they are vulnerable - that there is no safe place anywhere, not even the World Trade Center or a fancy suburb - is a realistic feeling. We should not pooh-pooh it. We are more vulnerable. The state has not lived up to its obligations to the citizens.”

We can expect to hear calls for gun control on the one hand and greater public access to guns on the other, for a crackdown on fundamentalists from other nations and a return to fundamental morality in our own national life, said Rona M. Fields, an Alexandria, Va., psychologist and sociologist who has written five books on violence and society.

“People become fearful when they feel out of control, when they can’t control what is going to happen,” she said.

“In primitive societies, when they can’t control fire and water and the rains, famines, people followed the medicine man who tries to bring some kind of control and order to things.

“In our society, some people do run to the churches and they become very vulnerable to the contemporary versions of the witch doctors who have a simple solution. Give me a gun. Get rid of others. The situation is self-perpetuating.”

And we can expect a rise in intolerance, in spite of public protestations that our basic values have not changed.

In Britain, for example, the official response to terrorism is classic Churchillian stiff upper lip.

“The reality is that society adjusts and goes on with life as it always has,” said Peter Beane, first secretary for press and public affairs at the British Embassy in Washington. “The British people have chosen an unwillingness to be intimidated by terrorism.”

But after decades of terrorist attacks by Irish nationalists, British society has become “more factionalized and xenophobic,” Fields said, pointing to anti-Irish sentiment that sometimes results in denials of housing or jobs to people who speak with an Irish accent. “That part doesn’t seem to get much attention, but it is a common reaction,” she said.

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