Terrorism happens, but so do acts of courage
Terrorism happens, but so do acts of courage by strangers, Keith Bonnell writes.
It was raining bullets.
Something about that image has stuck with me throughout the last week, after the mass shooting in Las Vegas.
I wasn’t there. I wasn’t anywhere near the Jason Aldean concert, or the Mandalay Bay Casino hotel, or its 32nd floor. But that image, of death pelting concertgoers like rain, has lingered in my thoughts, and through my days.
It’s an unwelcome new nightmare, one more haunting idea to throw upon the pile in what seem, to me, to be our days of fear and loathing.
What else is causing us to be anxious these days? Well, hours earlier, some deranged loser in a U-Haul attacked a cop in Edmonton, then tried to run down whomever he could find on Jasper Avenue.
And, speaking of below-average humans finding themselves behind the wheel: The world is watching a nuclear version of you-show-meyours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine unzip itself somewhere between Rocket Man and (oh, let’s stick with the Elton John theme) Honky Cat Small Hands.
Here at home, things seem better. Well, except for the periodic shooting around the corner in the ByWard Market. And the bullet in the Billings Bridge shopping mall. And the boy killed drinking a Slushie. And the man who drugged, raped and videotaped 14 bartenders.
As I read the stories, as I do for my job as an editor at two newspapers every day, I can’t help but feel tired. Tired in my bones. It may be a tiredness born of worry.
I know I’m tired of thinking about when the world will come crashing down, tired of wondering whether the job market will keep me afloat, tired of wondering if I’ve accomplished enough for a man my age. I’m tired, truly, of waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next predictable note in a pounding background of deep-bass bad news.
IT WAS RAINING BULLETS. AND THE PEOPLE WERE RUNNING, AND FALLING, AND DYING IN THE RAIN.
I asked Louise Lemyre, a professor at the University of Ottawa and an expert in risk perception and resilience, about the reach of horrible, awful, no good news, and its toll.
“If people are overly exposed to violent messages over which they don’t have any control or don’t learn of any way to address them, it may … raise their anxiety, but it may also encourage a withdrawal from it, an avoidance,” she says. “And the avoidance can be not just of the sites where things could happen, but also avoidance of the ideas, the causes, the problems.”
There’s something to that, I think: the sense of feeling detached from it all because it’s somehow too much, somehow just hopeless.
“Exposure when there’s no way to gain either meaning, or control, or a form of empowerment can be deleterious,” she says.
Deleterious. (Causing harm or damage, according to Google.)
Well then. Case closed. That’s it, in a nutshell. These terrorist bastards have foisted a “deleterious” state upon me. I’m in a deleterious state of mind. It’s Fast and Deleterious, starring an agitated editor, standing in for Vin Diesel. Hairline similar. Physique, hmmm … distinct.
“In the case of Sept. 11,” Lemyre says, “there have been documented cases of people who had the equivalent of PTSD without having been there.”
That’s exceedingly rare, she says. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have PTSD. That seems like it should be the purview of real victims and first responders, of soldiers, of policefolk, of firefighters. Of people who can lay fair claim to being in the line of fire, to being survivors and heroes.
But where does that leave the rest of us, as we watch the world burn on our iPhones?
The bullets came from 32 storeys up. They sliced into people at a country music show. The crowd thought they were hearing fireworks, until they realized it was something else.
Lemyre says it’s not all deleterious. We can feel helpless, she tells me, when we have no control. It makes us feel powerless, like victims, even when we’re not being directly affected.
But there are ways to take back that sense of control: Learn first aid, donate blood. Prepare for the eventualities that might never happen. Learn to look for emergency exits when you go to a major venue.
It sounds too easy, too simple. But research has shown it works, she says. “People felt comfort from at least doing something.”
I call up another expert, professor Wayne Corneil. I want to ask him about our stewing climate of fear and anxiety. I want him to tell me about how terrorists are winning the culture war, bringing out the worst in all of us.
Except that’s not what Corneil thinks at all. He studies the “psychosocial aspects of disasters and terrorism.” The feels of it all.
If there’s a silver lining to the horrible news we see, Corneil thinks he’s got it. And the data agree with him, he says.
“In all the research that we do … looking at what we call psychosocial impacts of disasters, catastrophes, terrorism, etc., basically there’s this sort of stereotype that what this does is it creates anxiety and fear in the population,” he says. “In fact, it doesn’t.”
The often overlooked truth of terrorism, he says, is that it proves to be a testing ground for the human spirit. And, with few exceptions, the human spirit comes out on top.
Terrorism, he contends, is built on a flawed premise. It doesn’t end up creating long-term terror. It creates survivors.
“The idea of terrorism is to strike terror into people, but it’s very short-lived. It’s very, very quick. In fact, what it tends to do is it creates just the opposite reaction. It creates this kind of anger and resolve that, ‘You cannot do this to me, or my family, or my community, or my country.’ ”
I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I’m pretty anxious. I think I’d make Woody Allen seem chill.
Sure, says Corneil, who offers governments and organizations advice about cultivating resiliency. Perhaps, in the moment. But sooner or later, you’re booking a trip to Edmonton, heading down to Vegas for a bachelor party, and pushing past these one-off disasters.
OK, so I’ll get over it. But my navel-gazing aside, how about the people who survive these horrors firsthand? Do people ever recover from witnessing such ugliness?
“The majority of the people deal with it and, in fact, what happens is, they develop more resiliency in their lives. Because this is something now they can point to and say, ‘My God, if I can survive that, I can survive anything.’ ”
Just look at the history, he says. During the Battle of Britain — a different day, a different place, a different fight — a country came together under daily bombardment.
“Life is a very powerful force. And that desire to keep on and keep going is incredibly strong. And that’s what we see. That’s what we’ve documented in all the research.”
That’s not to downplay the toll the media takes. Lemyre, for her part, suggests it’s failing society.
“It really has become part of the entertainment business to keep on 24 hours coverage of incidents. The goal is not to empower people, the goal seems to be to make the business thrive,” she says.
“When there are huge times of crisis, the media themselves have to respect the need for respite from it.”
Give people relevant, useful information, but don’t become a dayand-night barrage of gore, she says. I make a note. Tough battle, that. But to stand up for my profession, one thing media also do is find those stories of survival and of the human spirit. The story of the men who covered their wives with their own bodies as Stephen Paddock unleashed his anger, his madness and his bullets upon them. The stories of strangers helping strangers get to safety. As we wrap up a short but powerful conversation, Corneil offers me a different image than the one that’s been recurring to me.
“When we research all of these things and you take a look at the tapes afterwards, you don’t see people running away. You see people running to the victims. They’ve got a purpose; they’re running to assist the people who are injured.”
So yes, I’m tired. I’m tired of worrying, I’m tired of seeing so much bad. But let’s not close our eyes to the good, to these stories of defiance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. To the stories, told by media, of humans at their best and their worst.
I’ve always believed those stories connect us to our fellow humans, in fundamental and immeasurable ways. It’s why I still do what I do. It’s how I measure the life I’ve lived. Because sometimes those stories can cast a light amid the darkness.
Sometimes they can shield us from the rain.