Journal of Student Research 2018

57 One Month to Grieve- A Study of Menomonie’s Mourning After 9/11 persons posters that popped up in Manhattan immediately following the attacks. “You will see [a poster] on a lamppost near your house,” she writes. “It will break your heart. Then, in the next few days, you will see thousands. They will all break your heart. After several months, they’ll still be there, tattered and rain-streaked, but you won’t see them anymore” (92). There is a limit to how much trauma someone can carry before he grows exhausted and starts to distance himself (not out of apathy, but out of self-preservation), seeking familiarity wherever he can find it. This kind of detachment is intended as a coping mechanism but can also prematurely paralyze important discussions about a traumatic event. More importantly, growing calloused towards such violent images can have a cascading effect, where one not only becomes immunized to the trauma of the initial event, but also becomes unaffected by violence in the future. This effect is especially notable when that violence is depicted as justice or retaliation for the initial harm that occurred. On October 11, 2001, one month after the World Trade Center attacks, the United States and Great Britain began a series of bombing runs in the Middle East as retaliation for the terrorist attacks (War 6). Even though the news was printed in Stoutonia , the student newspaper in Menomonie, Wisconsin, students at University of Wisconsin-Stout seemed more interested in the Sunday football game between the Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints, and student engagement with the latest military retaliation in the Middle East was muted. An anonymous Stoutonia staff editorial notes in October that, “as upset as we all got back on September 11, it has all seemed to taper off recently” (War 6). The author of the editorial was disturbed by students’ numb reaction to the bombing run, writing, “While life [in Menomonie] was going on as usual at the start of these bombing runs, people were being killed. [...] Shouldn’t we take notice?” (War 6). The students’ lack of interest was reflected in the exponential decline of 9/11-related articles in Stoutonia. After devoting a three-page spread to the attacks and numerous pages to student testimonials in the issue immediately following September 11, the Stoutonia news section returned to more local concerns in its very next September issue. Similarly, the Stoutonia’s columns section, which was saturated with personal stories about loss and mourning throughout September, returned to discussing homecoming and technology upgrades by mid-October. In one month, the stories surrounding 9/11 seemed to have grown repetitive to the point of being uninteresting, or simply too overwhelming to handle. In the event of such a massive tragedy and loss of life, a tidal wave of media can be detrimental—reading six near identical stories about missing relatives takes away from the emotional impact