Searching for the Right Script

I was speechless when a friend stopped me and said that New York and Washington had been attacked. Although I understood every word he had

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said, I was completely unable to comprehend what had happened. America had been attacked? As I tried to understand the source of my and many other Americans’ confusion, I eventually realized that the source of this mass confusion is that we do not possess the necessary tool that would help bring clarity to this situation: a script.

People use hundreds of scripts to get through each day. When I walk into my morning coffee shop, I see Ruth Ann, wish her good morning, respond that I am doing well when she asks how I am, and order my usual drink. She collects my money; I put one sweetener and one cream in the drink, stir it, say good-bye, and then leave. This is my morning coffee script. I don’t need to tediously think about each action because they have all occurred previously. I know, with a great deal of probability, what will happen next in the sequence of events and can thus rely on these prior experiences to understand the situation.

The confusion pervading America is because we do not have a script to think and feel through an event such as the terrorist attack of September 11. This is a unique situation for Americans not just because it is so uncommon for an attack of such enormity and surprise to fall upon us but also because it is an act of war by an invisible enemy. It becomes more confusing when we try to use the similar yet distinct script of the attack on Pearl Harbor to understand our current situation.

It would be overly simplistic to conclude that I will never forget where I was the morning of September 11 because there was a novel change to one of my personal scripts, my morning coffee script. If there is something positive that can be garnered from this recent display of destruction and alarm, it is that Americans now have the beginnings of a script that can help them cope with and survive a situation like the terrorist attack. Let us hope, though, that Americans will never have to use such a script.

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