Pearl Harbor parallel: How we can get our best revenge...
Patrick Houston,
Editorial Director, ZDnet AnchorDesk
Thursday, September 13, 2001
Several times during the television coverage of Tuesday's attack on America, the news anchors drew parallels to the assault on Pearl Harbor. Aptly so. The sheer enormity--in terms of loss of life, as well as national and global significance--will make Sept. 11, 2001, another day of infamy.
But the comparisons don't stop there. There are others. And now is the moment for those of us who belong to the AnchorDesk community--those of us joined by a common bond of technology--to give the similarities all due consideration.
IN THE AFTERMATH of this historic tragedy, history itself can offer us invaluable guidance for what we can--what we must--do in the days, weeks, and months ahead, particularly those of us who are cogs--big or small--in the engine of technology, the engine that drove America to its second act of postwar global preeminence.
Before Dec. 7, 1941, America was anxious and ambivalent about asserting itself with regard to the events unfolding across Europe. But Pearl Harbor galvanized America and set the nation off on the defining moment that was World War II, a phenomenal four-year effort of unity and self-sacrifice. It spawned "the greatest generation," who vanquished the forces of evil and not only cured the nation of its Great Depression but also built it into an unprecedented generator of economic prosperity.
Beyond the incalculable loss of life, psychological duress, and property damage, Tuesday's attack on America threatens each of us directly. How? By the damage it is expected to inflict on the nation's fragile economy. There is now a very real prospect that the uncertainty and fear will give the nation's already wheezing economy the nudge it doesn't need--the push into a certain recession.
AFTER ALL, THE ECONOMY has responded negatively to every significant national crises since 1940. In wake of every such event-- Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, the Gulf War--the Dow Jones industrial average slumped an average 0.9 percent the day after initial news hit, 2 percent after five days, and 4.5 percent after a month.
Will our economy falter again? It will--if, that is, we allow it to.
We are at a personal and national inflection point--to use Andy Grove's term--and it is at this nexus that the technology sector carries a special responsibility to assert its leadership, by way of words and actions.
It is, in a way, exquisitely simple: Technology companies, along with the efficiencies and productivity gains created by personal computers and software, led the United States to the longest economic expansion ever. Just as they led the way up, they have, over the past 18 months, led the way down--starting, of course, with the dot-bomb.
THE TECHNOLOGY SECTOR must rev itself up yet again, not only to prevent the economy from crumpling into recession but to metaphorically erect it anew out of the soot and ashes of the gleaming twin towers that now lay fallen. This would be our best revenge.
The cynics will say that my appeal is naïve. There is little we--you or I--can do to resurrect this complex and often incomprehensible organism that is the nation's economy, a body that operates on the basis of billions of everyday decisions and interactions at a sub-cellular level.
And if this were the economy of 1980, which was afflicted with overly high wages, aging plants, inferior quality, and other such structural weaknesses, I would readily concede to the cynics.
BUT THIS ECONOMY isn't the economy of 1980. The foundations are solid. No, this is a downturn rooted as much in psychology as in anything else. Why else do the financial markets refuse to acknowledge the positives: at 4.9 percent, the unemployment rate is still below its post-war average; the Index of Leading Indicators has been in ascent for four months now; consumer confidence has remained strong.
We cannot succumb to the psychology of anxiety any longer. If we do, we concede to the terrorists their main objective.
It is up to Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Case, Lou Gerstner, Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, John Doerr, Steve Jobs, and the other titans of technology to put their companies and their industry on a wartime footing. How? By setting petty competitive considerations aside, by resisting the stock market's shortsightedness, and by embracing a common, patriotic purpose to the benefit of the entire economy. And what could that be? How about this confidence-instilling move: A technology leader's summit, in which they gather to discuss an industry-wide moratorium on layoffs for an agreed upon period, whether it be three months, six months, or a year.
This, of course, would be an extraordinary--and controversial--step. But these are extraordinary times, calling for extraordinary action. The companies run the risk of bringing Wall Street's wrath upon them. Then again, the attack will leave Wall Street to do some serious soul-searching, too.
We cannot look up at the tall building and into blue sky with trepidation. And if FDR's Day of Infamy resonates with us today, so should the declaration he made some years before: "...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
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