Terrorism's targets not only the powerful

COLUMN GOSIER E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times,
published November 6, 2001

Her name is Erma.

She is widowed, lives in Pinellas Park and watches too much television. For several weeks now, she has been on edge. The mail that used to be one of the highlights of her day now is cause for anxiety.

She worries that that envelope offering discounts on all sorts of stuff she doesn't need might also be full of anthrax.

A couple of weeks ago, when letters containing anthrax spores started turning up, a lot of people, many of them much like Erma, jammed emergency lines and overloaded hazardous materials workers with calls for help.

If an envelope didn't have a return address, then opening it was a job for HazMat, many people thought.

If the sender got your name wrong, that was a dead giveaway that it came from one of those poor-spelling terrorists. If you just had a feeling about a letter or package, well, better safe than sorry.

Nine-one-one was called so often that emergency workers had to plead with anxious citizens to cease fire. Most mail is just mail, they assured them, as safe as it always was.

It was during that frenetic time that Erma was born, a shorthand symbol reporters gave to the kind of nervous person flooding the phone lines. Erma was Everywoman, one of the people called ordinary by people who, for whatever tenuous reason, see themselves as something else.

She had come to symbolize little ol' ladies everywhere who worried about anthrax arriving in a letter addressed to them.

A couple of my cynical colleagues were amused. "Why would anyone want to hurt Erma?" they asked derisively. "Let's see," they mimicked imaginary terrorists discussing prospective targets for their anthrax mailings, "the Senate, the New York Times, NBC, Erma of Pinellas Park, the Justice Department. . . ."

They're after high-profile targets, they laughed. Erma's safe.

"Where in the terrorist rule book," I asked, "does it say you must mail your anthrax only to muckety-mucks in the government or media? Wouldn't it be more consistent with terrorist aims if innocent people were targeted for no apparent reason other than they are American? If terror is their goal, wouldn't that be the ultimate assault?"

They humored me.

Then Kathy Nguyen died.

By all accounts, Ms. Nguyen was a lot like Erma, a nice lady who had gone about her life for 61 years and felt fairly safe in her home. Unlike Erma, she stayed too busy to watch much television and had to be cautioned by neighbors to be vigilant with her mail.

She didn't have time to clog 911 switchboards, nor apparently the inclination.

She was like millions of Americans who are dangerously self-sufficient and self-reliant. They would rather miss a meal or two than borrow from a friend. They choose to endure a cough a few days longer rather than go to the doctor for pills to suppress it. They ride out fevers because fevers eventually will break; they always have in the past.

Many are that way because it is part of their character. Others because they are poor and can't afford to run to the doctor whenever their bodies act up. Others because they once were poor and developed those habits.

That is why, when the first anthrax letter appeared, my concern was for people like Erma and Ms. Nguyen and all the poor people in the country whom my colleagues think are safe.

First, I couldn't recall any indication that the terrorists who hijacked the planes Sept. 11 had checked manifests beforehand to make sure they were loaded with muckety-mucks. My guess is also that they didn't go through the World Trade Center and tell everyone with low incomes to sneak quietly out of the building before they crashed the planes into them. Unlikely, unintentional targets, poor folks are susceptible to ambient danger, and that's just as lethal as a bull's-eye hit.

Probably more so. Senators don't have to worry about anthrax, but the people who sort their mail do. The people who empty the trash cans that hold discarded mail do.

And those are the people least likely to go to the doctor when symptoms of anthrax begin to show. They are the same people who for years have learned about their circulatory problems while lying on a hospital bed recovering from a massive stroke or heart attack. That's if they were lucky. The unlucky ones have the news broken to their relatives.

As the spores of anthrax turn up in an ever-widening pattern of madness, those are the people I worry about: the people who have resigned themselves to poverty and the concessions it teaches them to make.

I am concerned about the people who would rather feed their families than invest their money in a visit to the doctor.

I am concerned about the people who are hit hardest by every malady that befalls America, the people who die when the rest of America only gets sick.

I am not too worried about Erma. She knows, perhaps too well, how to dial 911.

I worry about the Kathy Nguyens and people like her who won't dial 911, no matter how bad they feel.

And for once, I hope the colleagues who disagree with me are right.

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