9/11

4 Pages 889 Words

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, four Boeing passenger jets were hijacked within an hour by nineteen Arab terrorists armed with box cutters. Pilots among these terrorists took control of the commercial planes and changed course towards targets in New York City and Washington D.C. Two of the planes were deliberately crashed into the nations political and financial centers, causing fires within the towers, which melted the steel support structures, thereby causing the buildings to collapse completely. A third airplane was deliberately crashed into the Pentagon. Passengers on the fourth plane overpowered the hijackers and caused the airplane to crash in Pennsylvania. This was an attack on America planned and directed by Osama Bin Laden as the leader of Al-Qaeda, a previously obscure anti-U.S. international terrorist organization composed of mainly Arabs. This horrible tragedy crippled the airline industry and shook America’s sense of security. After this horrible attack Americans suffered not only physically but psychologically also. Because of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Americans were affected in five key ways, which in turn will affect American society in the way it responds, reacts, and recovers.
The first way that Americans were affected by the 9/11 attacks was the role that the media played by showing detailed coverage to American citizens. This caused Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in some Americans that watched the terrible acts unfold. Jennifer Ahern and Sandro Galea, wrote that “Exposure to graphic television images may exacerbate psychological symptoms in disaster situations. We tested the hypothesis that more frequent viewing of television images of the September 11 terrorist attacks was associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, and that direct exposure to disaster events had a interactive effect with media viewing (1). We recruited 1,008 adults of the borough of Manhattan of...