Dread comes to Pottery Barn

As officials tell us to expect more terrorism, the nation's yuppies prepare.

By Andrew Nelson

Oct. 11, 2001 | South of San Francisco's Market Street, in a loft building pockmarked with the empty offices of dead dot-com companies, six professionals cluster around a conference table. They're young, stylish, urbane and, now, afraid.

Since Sept. 11, many Americans are spinning scenarios formerly left to airport-lounge novels and pyromaniacal film directors: collapsed bridges, cities in chaos, families overcome in the street by terrible and silent plague. Fears of terrorist reprisals have only grown since Sunday, when the United States and Britain began bombing Afghanistan and health officials uncovered a second case of anthrax in Lantana, Fla. For former masters and mistresses of the American universe, the news over the last month has been profoundly unsettling. Dread has come to Pottery Barn.

"I'm worried," admits Joan, 40, who works in San Francisco's financial district. Like the rest of the group, the legal aide doesn't want to supply her last name. "The government's not telling us everything," she says. "Anyone who thinks they're hearing everything is fooling themselves."

Does that sound paranoid? Those here on a Saturday afternoon appear earnest. They're not Ted Kaczynskis in log cabins; they're the "Friends" cast in an IKEA-furnished loft. No one wields M-16s -- just Nokias. Children of the Information Age, Joan and her friends are here to get to the facts. What do you do when "it" happens? "It" is defined as whatever's recently crawled up your spine to lodge in the cerebral cortex: biological attacks, chemical assaults, hot-wired nukes or car bombs. The list is limited only by the capacity of an individual's imagination. How to regain control?

"We need to know more," says the group's host, an affable, smooth-speaking consultant named Gordon whose demographics would put a gleam in the eye of a Banana Republic marketing VP. He's just turned 30. The leftover birthday cake and the microbrew are still in the fridge with the Red Bull. Around him are the signs of success: lots of computers, cool office furniture and a trilling cellphone.

"We need to understand more about what the threats are to us as citizens," he says, "and what we can do about it."

Know more. Gordon's five-person consultancy helps its clients manage internal communications. Preparing for terrorism means planning for outcomes -- language familiar to anyone whose butt has fallen asleep sitting through the PowerPoint presentation on 3Q marketing plans. Responding to terror means "managing" change.

Despite President Bush and other officials' pitches for a return to normalcy, Gordon, for one, eschews the idea that Americans should "get back to our old routines."

"I thought that was one of the silliest conversations I had heard of," he says. "Things aren't 'routine' anymore."

He has a point. Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Americans have received contradictory messages about the threat of more terrorist violence. The president says it's safe to fly, but fighter jets patrol the skies over our 15 largest cities as Attorney General John Ashcroft warns of "a clear and present danger." Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, tells the nation it can meet a bioterrorist threat even as rumors career through suburbs from Manhasset, N.Y., to Marin County, Calif., about the hoarding of antibiotics such as Ciproflaxacin, which is thought to be helpful in cases of anthrax. Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn convenes a "Gas Mask Club" in a Georgetown restaurant and invites ex-Secret Service agents to explain the finer points of shielding homes from chemical agents.

"I have stocked up on bottled water, flashlights with batteries and canned goods, and I keep the car filled with gas," Quinn wrote in her Oct. 3 column. If someone as well connected as Quinn (she's married to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee) is getting jumpy, should we start jittering, too?

Joan looks at the other brows at the table. The furrows mirror her own. "If something happens in the city we're screwed," she says.

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