As you read this, almost exactly seven weeks have passed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Some things have changed drastically, some not at all. Those who do business in the San Fernando Valley at times feel they have been severely affected; at other times they feel like they are living in a remote land, far away from events on the East Coast. Some people and everybody at one time or the other feel their personal lives are forever changed, others not at all. It’s raised questions about how events “out there” have an impact on us “in here.” Lower Manhattan (even before Sept. 11) can seem so far from Encino or Northridge that nothing that happens there could have an impact on us. However, if you believe we are citizens of the world working in a global economy, tragedy struck very close by. Coming up on two months since the terrorist attacks, I think we have to ask ourselves what has changed for those of us who live and work in the San Fernando Valley? And what will be different in the future? What has become nearly a mantra is that “business was bad before, but it’s really going to be rough now.” Those seem to be the sentiments regardless of whether you work at a Valley outpost of one of America’s largest corporations, own a small store in a strip center, run a major studio, wait tables at a coffee shop or design next-generation products for a tech company. And when we talk about qualities like “bad” or “rough,” we mean everything from losing a job or a company’s earnings were off in the third quarter to deferring business expansion or tabling those speeches to the boss about the raises we deserve. Certainly, the phrase “events of Sept. 11” now are peppering explanations of poor corporate performance, despite the fact that three-quarters of the third quarter had already elapsed by the day of the attacks. You could say the impact terrorists have had in the last several weeks is just a good excuse for some bad news that was going to be hard enough to explain anyway. But that is probably unfair. Yes, the airlines were in peril before all this, even if many of us were not paying attention. But things have gotten worse. There are small companies here in the Valley whose largest customers are airlines. They may have been insecure before; now they’re worried about getting paid for work they’ve already done, let alone orders that have stopped. The anthrax scare has made us all edgy about our mail, even if we don’t live at the White House or work at the U.S. Capitol. It has been devastating for those who make their living trying to figure out how to send you something in the mail that is intriguing enough to get you to open it (and you can read about them elsewhere in this issue). But their jobs had already become tougher as more and more of us relied on e-mail, fax machines and telecommunications for our serious message sending and receiving. Television networks and the print media were already expecting a bad, bad year when it comes to advertising sales. It’s only gotten worse in recent weeks. Tourists are not visiting and hotels and theme parks are laying off those employees who can least afford it; defense-oriented companies are gearing up for what they believe will be a bonanza as both the government and the business world look to make themselves more secure. Beginning way back in January, we spoke of “mixed” signals in the economy. We still can do so, only these days we mean willful optimism is “mixed” with pessimism fueled by real tragedy. The shock of Sept. 11’s horror became transformed into the aftermath of the attacks. Paranoia about anthrax was added. Now, here at the height of the earnings-announcement season, we have the additional element of unfortunate news about our businesses. For most of us, terrorists in planes, anthrax in the mail and poor earnings reports all seem to be part of the same story. We blame Osama Bin Laden, even though he hardly deserves all the credit for an economic slowdown that started a year ago. What he (or somebody) managed to do was get great mileage out of events already unfolding. It is hard to avoid seeing everything through the same prism now and perhaps to avoid blowing news out of proportion. For example, the reality is that, as far as we know, only a handful of letters somehow tainted with anthrax have been mailed to a few addresses. By the end of last week, three people had died, a tragedy indeed but nothing compared to the number of deaths associated with the World Trade Center disaster. But the response has been overwhelming, paralyzing much of American business and society. Somebody somewhere must feel they have gotten quite a bang for their buck. So, seven weeks after the events of Sept. 11 and counting, what does the future look like? Perhaps not much different than it did before. (Try finding an economic forecaster that still doesn’t say things will be better sometime in 2002.) The only thing that’s different may be our attitude, one thing we still can control. Michael Hart is editor of the San Fernando Valley Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].