National Tragedy, Universal Excuse

A frazzled working mother with season tickets to the Long Beach Opera recently missed a performance. She called and asked for new ones, explaining she had been overwhelmed by the events of Sept. 11 and had not opened her mail to get her tickets. The truth of the matter was, she was vacationing in Yosemite.

The woman is not the only person who has used the national crisis as an excuse.

Although the evidence is anecdotal, it seems that plenty of people have invoked Sept. 11 as an explanation for behavior or decisions that actually have nothing to do with the attacks or their aftermath.

One woman, who resents having to send Christmas cards each year, was thrilled to hear a pundit speculate recently that perhaps suspending the tradition is the patriotic thing to do, in order to avoid overloading the U.S. Postal Service, which is grappling with anthrax.

And who hasn’t at least thought to fend off an unwanted social invitation with the perfectly reasonable “No, thanks. I really need to stay home and bond with the family?” If nothing else, it’s a fine alternative to “We can’t stand the thought of spending an evening with you people.”

For obvious reasons, these people prefer to remain unnamed.

As the excuses roll in, people on the receiving end are in the position of having to suppress skepticism, because the terrible event has been cited. Since the Enlightenment, there’s been a premium on giving cause-and-effect explanations for most actions, says one scholar. “People say things like, ‘Because of Sept. 11 we all are now going to wear blue blazers and khaki pants,” said Sister Susan Sanders, director of the Center for Religion and Public Discourse at St. Xavier University in Chicago. “We jump to things like Sept. 11 as excuses because they are convenient. Maybe Sept. 11 was related, but it would take too much time to explain it. So people just say, ‘because of Sept. 11,’ and we are expected to understand. Because we are in this grieving mood, it’s OK.”

A local law firm sent out a change of address letter to clients Oct. 10 that began, “The tragic events of Sept. 11 continue to impact all of us.” The letter went on to explain that the firm was moving its offices from West Los Angeles to Santa Monica. “Our law firm has determined that for what we believe to be compelling reasons, the best interests of our attorneys and our staff will be served by an immediate move from our current building to a new space....” Several calls to the firm were not returned, so it remains unclear if security issues were involved.

Some companies are not even waiting for excuses before accommodating customers. Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank and American Express are a few companies that have extended grace periods and waived fees in special cases.

The mortgage branch of Wells Fargo set up a special phone line for customers affected by the attacks. “We have a voice response number that says, ‘If you have been directly impacted by the events of Sept. 11, you may hit 1 now,”’ said Wells Fargo mortgage spokesman Dan Frahm; 20,000 people have pushed 1. “It could be people calling to say, ‘Can you help me with my mortgage payment.’ It could be a number of people who just want to talk to someone live.”

Of course there are seemingly ridiculous excuses that turn out to be plausible.

For example, a condom company based in uptown Manhattan received a letter from a consumer complaining of a defective product back in August and did not reply until the end of September. Due to computer trouble caused by the events of Sept. 11, the letter said, we are unable to respond at this time. Nor any time soon, it would appear. Though the company’s excuse is plausible, one can only wonder why the firm can’t respond to a consumer’s letter. After all, the financial markets were up and running within days of the attacks.

A Sept. 27 breast cancer benefit concert, sponsored by Step Up Women’s Network, was moved from the 6,100-seat Greek Theatre to the 2,200-seat Wiltern Theatre citing the more “intimate and personal setting.”

“In light of recent tragic events, philanthropic efforts have been refocused to other immediate causes and therefore, a smaller venue is better suited for the show at this time,” the change of venue notice reads.

Although it appeared at first blush that the group may have been trying to save face due to anemic ticket sales, in reality, founder and president Kaye Popofski said the organization was just trying to funnel as much money as possible to the cause, rather than renting a more expensive venue that might end up half-empty.

“It was 100% a financial move,” Popofski said. “No question. There was just no way to fill the Greek. We didn’t have to move it. We just wouldn’t have raised as much money.”

Those who study the moral dimensions of decision-making say that using Sept. 11 as an excuse when it is not warranted raises interesting ethical questions.

Some worry that the attacks have created a situation ripe for abuse by corporations eager to cut costs, or politicians trying to pass legislation.

“It fits into a context of other kinds of issues,” said Rushworth Kidder, director of the Institute of Global Ethics based in Camden, Maine. “Airlines are cutting back huge numbers of people, but airlines were in trouble before this happened. They have strict unions, but all of a sudden they have the opportunity to cut people, and no one will complain. Is Congress being much more draconian in its security laws now that this has happened? There are things they have been trying to ram through for years, and all of a sudden here is the opportunity.”

Kidder said he was at a conference recently that was rife with no-shows because of travel bans that some corporations have enacted since the attacks. Were the travel bans in place for the safety and security of the employees, he wondered. Or was this just another way for companies to save money?

He also cited a more subtle use of Sept. 11 as an excuse in the field of fund-raising: Increasing numbers of solicitations are going out that say “Now more than ever” and loosely connecting themselves to the events of Sept. 11, though the organization may not have any reason to say that.

“I think the calculation there is ‘We can get away with this,” Kidder said.

Kenneth Alpern, a professor of ethics and director of the Center for Ethical Studies at Hiram College in Ohio, suggested the tendency to use the events as an excuse are just a darker side of Americans’ entrepreneurial spirit. Is that opportunity? Or opportunism?

“The culture of American business and the pressures of the bottom line lead one to have a tendency to be opportunistic,” he said. “Like any sport, you play to the line to see how far you can go. It’s the nature of competition and our culture of aggressiveness.

“There is nothing evil about it,” he added. “But it can make you push the boundaries while people are disheveled, afraid, not paying so much attention to what you are doing.”

One such incident so disturbed Kidder that he wrote about it on his online ethics newswire.

A woman who works as special advisor to a high-ranking official in Britain’s Department of Transport sent an e-mail to her staff about an hour after the attacks. “It is now a very good day,” wrote Jo Moore, “to get out anything we want to bury.” When the e-mail came to light, it caused outrage. British newspapers tore into Moore. The House of Commons debated the incident, and members of Moore’s own Labour Party denounced her. Moore apologized, first in writing and later in a televised statement.

“Seasoned in the art of political spin, she knew the game, played by governments everywhere, of releasing bad news on a day when it would be overshadowed by more important stories,” Kidder wrote in his ethics newswire.

In each of us, he said, there is a trigger mechanism that activates at some threshold of moral limitation. Just as a child must calculate how far she can push her parents before she gets a spanking, similarly, adults must judge when they have stepped over the line.

“When events around us cause us to interrupt our general routine, we experience fright, heightened focus, increased care for others, a greater willingness to endure normally unthinkable hardships,” Kidder wrote.

In certain extraordinary situations, Kidder posited, we don’t ask, “How can I make the most of this,” the way we normally do. Instead, he said, we ask, “What’s right?”