I’ll never forget that beautiful Tuesday morning. Unaware that anything had happened, I arrived at the office to find people gathered around the fourth-floor windows.
When I joined them, I saw the smoke and flames billowing out of the towers and I realized that the world we had known was forever changed…
Wait. I can’t go on.
It’s such a waste of time to relive 9/11 in this manner just because someone expects a comment on it.
Nothing can erase the pain of it, or the fear that something worse may be coming. So I avoided the media bath this past Sept. 11 and just waited for the miserable day to end.
We’re rushing things, and it’s unlikely to lead to any greater understanding of what happened or what to do next.
Yes, 9/11 is a historical event, but it’s too recent to be thought of as “history” in the same way as Pearl Harbor and the death of JFK. And it’s too early for historians to codify what Gore Vidal calls the “agreed-upon facts.”
Many of the assumptions we made during those first few weeks were wrong. For example, many pundits predicted we would turn into a more caring society.
That hasn’t happened. We still see thuggish behavior in business and on the roads, and celebrities still haven’t learned how to shut up.
Maybe there has been one change: People are more concerned with family, and with striking a balance between their work and home lives. But as Craig Wood of Yankelovich’s Monitor MindBase division has said, that trend started prior to 9/11.
Then there’s our more mundane area of direct marketing. Many observers predicted that direct mail would die in the wake of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks.
That hasn’t happened either, although the long-term outlook remains clouded.
Blame it on the economy or the new media, but people are mailing less. Envelope sales are down, as are Standard A mail volume and list rentals.
Should this matter in a multichannel world? Yes, because it is far from clear that companies have diverted these dollars to wise use of e-mail, or that they’re realizing increased profitability.
Several firms have disappeared in the last year, but most of these probably would have gone with or without 9/11.
But back to the big picture. The key thing is that the United States has not been attacked again. Who knows the reason? It could be increased homeland security, the disruption of al-Qaida or simple inertia. It could change by the time you read this.
Let’s hope that we won’t have another such day to memorialize.
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