Distress signals

When Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast this week, Amy Novick of Wellesley had a sudden impulse to check the emergency supplies she had stored in her home after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

It's not that Novick is expecting a devastating storm to hit the Boston area. But the past four years have delivered a series of jolts to her sense of security: Sept. 11, the December tsunami in south Asia, and now the destruction and chaos of the hurricane. An inventory of confidence-shaking events for your average citizen could also include the bloody course of the Iraq war, the terror attacks in London and Madrid, and now the sudden and stratospheric rise in gasoline prices.

All in all, as the nation prepares to mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11 a week from tomorrow, a lot of people are feeling psychologically vulnerable, due to the mood of near-apocalypse evoked by the horrific images on television. ''I'm somewhat shell-shocked," said Novick, 44. ''It reminds you that things like this can happen. You go around saying things will be OK, and then sometimes they don't turn out OK."

Like a grim bookend to 9/11, the hurricane has shattered any remaining illusions that America could be exempt from catastrophe. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed to Ezell Tatum of Lowell that trouble usually happened far from the United States. The 21st century has been quite a different matter. ''It seems like it's a lot closer now," said Tatum, 53. ''It seems like everything has been happening since 9/11. Terrorism. The hurricane. It's overwhelming."

Many of the two dozen people interviewed for this story were quick to acknowledge that their anxiety does not remotely compare to the suffering of the hurricane victims. Nor do they see any sort of moral equivalence between death in a natural disaster and paying more than $3 for a gallon of gas. But they are stunned at how the bad news just keeps coming, making the unthinkable thinkable, such as the virtual erasure of a major American city. ''Now they're saying New Orleans is going to be closed for two months! That just blows my mind," exclaimed Laura Styn, 27, of Hudson. Styn has limited herself to watching a half-hour of televised coverage a day. ''Sometimes you get too much of it, and it drains you emotionally," she said.

Jay Polk, 43, of Bellingham had a similar experience this week. ''After a while, it was just sort of mind-numbing," said Polk. ''You were looking at the pictures, you were seeing the devastation people were suffering, and you felt for them. But on some level you want to distance yourself from it, because it's so harsh, so devastating. It's just beyond words."

To Robert Jay Lifton, a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who has written extensively about such events as Hiroshima and the Holocaust, such reactions are not surprising. Lifton, author of the newly reissued ''Home From the War: Learning From Vietnam Veterans," said yesterday that a phenomenon he calls ''psychic numbing" often sets in when ''people feel bombarded by not only bad news but devastating news, involving widespread killing and dying." In a crisis such as the hurricane, there are both ''immediate survivors" and ''distant survivors," he said, and even the distant survivors can be overwhelmed by anguish and feelings of helplessness unless they find an outlet through some kind of action.

He noted that the sense of unity that prevailed after 9/11 is not yet as strong, with critics faulting the hurricane relief effort and questioning why New Orleans was not better protected against flooding. ''With most disasters, there is a honeymoon period," he said. ''All New Yorkers seemed to be united in helping each other [after 9/11]. What seems to have happened in this disaster is that a large number of people, most of them poor and many of them black, were the main victims and got very little help and continue to get very little help. . . . There may be something closer to unity as more help is provided."

In the meantime, the tragedy in New Orleans and the spike at the gas pumps are now, in very different ways, rippling through the collective psyche of Massachusetts. For some residents of this bluest of blue states, the double-barreled shocks have inflamed their anger at the occupant of the White House. ''On George Bush's watch, we're watching five people a day die for no apparent reason in Iraq, and we're watching gasoline prices spiral higher than at any time in history," said Peter Hirsch, 56, of Marlborough. ''He's just idly sitting by and watching these things happen." Emily Jackson, 36, of Holliston said she wishes some of the money being spent on the war in Iraq could be diverted to hurricane relief.

For others, thoughts have turned queasily to this nation's lack of alternatives to oil, its insistence on driving gas-guzzling SUVs, and its preparedness to cope with crisis. Amy Novick has been deeply troubled by what she has seen unfolding on her TV screen, with its endless images of desperate people waiting for help that hasn't seemed to come. ''I'm worried that if something like that happened up here, the government wouldn't respond in a timely manner," she said. ''You turn on CNN and Fox, and there are all these people sitting on the highway, and no one's helping them."

If Lifton is right and action is one way to combat despair, some are ready to do just that. Jackson, Styn, and Novick said they plan to contribute to hurricane relief. However people are processing the disquieting events of the past four years, any sense of invulnerability Americans once may have felt is gone. There seems, too, to be a general understanding that the old way of thinking about the world will no longer suffice.

''Now we're in this disaster mode that's a combination of natural disasters and terrorist disasters," said Diane Remin, 54, of Cambridge. ''As Americans, we're not used to disasters on our soil. . . . All of a sudden, we're in the world, and experiencing our share of world disasters."

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.