U.S. Gets Back to Normal

It was during Sunday school at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church that Janice Vogel finally got angry.

Her husband, Fritz, had been away from their Birdsboro, Pa., home for months. The Air Force recalled Fritz to active duty Oct. 21 to manage construction projects at an air base in New Jersey, part of the call-up in support of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

That was bad enough. But Fritz Vogel owns his own business, a small welding firm. When he was called up, he had to close the shop and lay off his two oldest sons.

So when Janice Vogel, 48, heard one of her neighbors announce her relief that she felt free to go shopping at the mall again now that life had “returned to normal,” she reddened.

“Don’t they understand how this has changed our world completely?” she asked. “I don’t want any sympathy, but I’d like some support for the men who are out there.”

Six months after Sept. 11, here’s what’s changed:

The federal government, its budget and its public image. The focus of American foreign policy. Security measures at airports, seaports and border crossings. The nation’s sense of patriotism, cohesion and vulnerability. The lives of almost 1.4 million people in the armed services, including more than 78,000 reservists abruptly yanked from their civilian lives. And, of course, the fates of the victims, their families and friends.

Here’s what hasn’t changed much: Everything else.

The nation’s economy is recovering at a handsome pace; the terrorist attacks delayed the rebound only briefly. Politics is back to normal too: Democrats and Republicans are fighting over taxes and energy policy and election campaigns as if last fall’s brief show of wartime bipartisanship had never happened.

Americans still say they feel more worried, more patriotic, more religious and more charitable than before Sept. 11, but they aren’t behaving that way. Their career choices, marriage rates, church attendance, charitable donations and volunteering have settled back into pre-crisis patterns.

Only five months after a wave of anthrax-laced letters killed five people, the mail is back to normal. Americans are even returning to airline travel: Passenger miles are still lower than a year ago, but the gap is narrowing.

Instead of the war on terrorism changing “everything,” as some predicted, the nation has seen a kind of patchwork mobilization. The government, the military, the airlines are all still on a wartime footing. But the rest of the country is largely “back to normal.”

“It’s as if there are two different worlds,” said Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard University social scientist. “There was, and there still is, a significant change in the mood of the country. . . . But changes in behavior--in giving blood or giving money--have been much less marked.”

When the hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many likened the attacks to Pearl Harbor. But Pearl Harbor and World War II transformed American society by drawing more than 16 million men and women into the armed forces, more than 12% of the population. During the Vietnam War, 8.7 million served, about 4% of the population.

This war is being fought by a military of 1.4 million, less than one-half of 1% of the population. (And only about 5,300 of those troops are in or around Afghanistan.) “Imagine Pearl Harbor if it hadn’t been followed by World War II,” said William A. Galston, a University of Maryland political scientist. “What transformed the World War II generation wasn’t the shock of the [Pearl Harbor] attack but the comprehensive national mobilization that followed.”

“Well, we’ve had the attack but not the mobilization. What is most dramatic about the six months since Sept. 11 is not how much our lives have changed but rather how little.”

Carmen Perez misses her children.

Perez, 43, loved being a stay-at-home mom in San Sebastian, Puerto Rico, to 17-year-old Iris and 10-year-old Juan, “my baby.”

But three days after Sept. 11, her Army Reserve unit, the 311th Mortuary Affairs Company, was airlifted to Virginia to recover bodies from the wreckage of the Pentagon.

“I prayed for strength,” she said.

Six months later, Sgt. Perez is still in Virginia, sorting the personal effects of the dead. Her husband and children are back home in Puerto Rico. She has been told her deployment may last a full year, which could mean she would miss Iris’ high school graduation.

Still, she said she felt glad to pitch in--and touched that the victims’ families reached out to her unit with cheers and thanks.

“We didn’t expect anything like that,” she said.

The shared experience of Sept. 11 did make Americans more worried about their safety, more concerned about each other and more willing to support federal spending on defense and other programs--attitudes that persist today.

A CBS News poll in January found that 65% of the public believed more terrorist attacks were likely, although only 22% said they feared that their own areas would be targeted. (Fully 88% said their daily routines had returned to normal.)

Several polls have found that Americans’ trust in the government’s ability to do the right thing has jumped significantly--from 31% to 55% in the CBS poll, for example.

Support for increased defense spending also soared, including, for the first time, among a majority of women as well as men.

Characteristically, when Americans were asked if they wanted the government to spend more on defense, homeland security, education, health care or energy, a majority said yes to all of the choices without sorting out priorities.

“People want guns and butter too,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, an independent opinion research group.

But that doesn’t mean they consciously want a bigger federal government. “People don’t like government more; they just need government more,” Kohut said.

But Putnam believes there’s a chance that trend could have lasting consequences.

“The growth in trust in government is just astonishing,” Putnam said. “If it were to last, I think it could have a major long-run impact on politics. People would see government as part of the solution, not just part of the problem.”

That increased trust in government came along with an increased willingness to trust--and work with--others in the community, he said.

On the other hand, Putnam noted, it could all just be a blip on the graph.

“After almost any crisis, calamity or natural disaster, there’s a sudden spike in community-mindedness, whether it’s an earthquake, a flood or a snowstorm in Buffalo,” he said. “But these spikes don’t last. Over time, the community feeling dissipates.

“The only exception I know to that rule is Pearl Harbor. The increase in community-mindedness among people who went through Pearl Harbor and World War II still hasn’t disappeared. They still vote more, give more, volunteer more--even though they’re getting pretty old now.

“So the question is: Is the movement we saw in community-mindedness after 9/11 going to be like Pearl Harbor or a Buffalo snowstorm?

“We don’t know yet. We ought to be talking about how to make this moment last.”

President Bush made “a wonderful start” by proposing to bring more than 200,000 new volunteers into federal programs for national service, like the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps.

“But there’s not much going on at the local level,” Putnam said. “The odds are that this will be more like a Buffalo snowstorm.”

The terrorist attacks affected public opinion in two more ways that could be important to the nation’s politics, at least in the short run.

They appear to have increased Americans’ commitment to an assertive foreign policy. In the Pew poll, 61% said the best way to prevent terrorism would be to be active in world affairs. An impressive 73% supported using military force against Iraq--although 53% wanted to have the support of other allies first.

And the experience of the last six months clearly has changed Bush’s image in the eyes of many. His increased stature could, in turn, improve the Republicans’ chances in congressional races this fall.

Until Sept. 11, Bush’s approval rating was bumping along the 50% mark. After Sept. 11, that number soared above 90% and has remained at 75% or higher, a record run by historical standards.

“That’s real,” said Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas). “That suggests that people have gotten to know George W. Bush and have decided that they like him. And that goes a long way in politics.”

About three weeks after the terrorist attacks, Gramm said, another senator suggested that politics had probably changed “forever” and that a new bipartisanship would be the order of the day.

“I don’t want to sound like a cynic, but forever is a long time,” Gramm replied.

“In any case, I think things did change for about three months,” he said. “And that’s close to forever in politics.”

Laura Murcott, 29, still commutes to work from her North Hollywood home. But instead of driving to her civilian job as an insurance claims adjuster in Glendale, she now drives more than 50 miles to Channel Islands Air National Guard Station in Port Hueneme.

Capt. Murcott is a navigator on a C-130 transport in the California Air National Guard. If Marines need an airlift to a homeland security emergency in the Western United States, her unit may be the one to take them.

“A lot of people aren’t really aware” that thousands of reservists have been mobilized. “But I’ve managed to get past that. If people can have their normal lives, that’s a good thing.”

The real strain is “knowing that we could be alerted for a mission at any time. That takes its toll.”

The effect of Sept. 11 on the nation’s economy ought to be easy to see, but it’s not.

Initially, things were painfully clear: stock markets suspended, airports closed, more than 120,000 airline employees laid off, resorts and hotels empty and a wide range of other businesses planning for a deeper recession.

“If ever a situation existed in which the fabric of business and consumer confidence, both here and abroad, was vulnerable to being torn, the shock of Sept. 11 was surely it,” Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently told Congress. “Indeed, for a period of weeks, U.S. economic activity did drop dramatically in response to that shock.”

But by the end of 2001, Greenspan said, “business and consumer confidence recovered, no doubt buoyed by success in the war on terrorism.”

“The recuperative powers of the U.S. economy . . . have been remarkable,” he concluded.

Economic statistics released during the last month have brought almost uniformly good news: manufacturing production up, consumer spending up, growth estimates up, the stock market up.

But that doesn’t mean Sept. 11 had no lasting effect.

Many economists believe the great economic boom of the 1990s was driven principally by two forces: a federal budget that moved from deficit to surplus, producing historically low interest rates that made it cheap for businesses to borrow; and increased use of computers and other technology, which made workers more productive and companies more efficient.

Now both those forces are in jeopardy.

The fact that the federal government will spend more on defense and homeland security--and run a deficit to do it--means that inflation and interest rates are likely to be higher than they would otherwise be. Billions of dollars won’t be available for other investments that would be more productive.

And as for the private sector, the new kinds of “friction”--the general burden of security measures that slow the flow of goods, people, information and money--sap potential economic strength.

It takes air travelers hours longer to get through airports--hours that add up to lost work and lost production. Similarly, the cost of shipping goods has gone up as FedEx, UPS and others have imposed surcharges, in part to cover the costs of increased security.

Major corporations say they also are spending more money and time on security.

The International Security Management Assn., a group of corporate security managers, polled its members in November and found that 77% expect to be spending more on domestic security measures this year.

Before Sept. 11, only 35% of the companies surveyed had plans for dealing with biological, chemical or nuclear attacks on their facilities. After Sept. 11, the number more than doubled.

But even there, the effects may not be as dramatic as predicted.

The Security Industry Assn., the trade group for makers of security systems and devices, held its convention and trade show in Las Vegas last week, and at least some participants reported that the boom they expected was more of a boomlet.

“Everyone I’ve talked to--manufacturers, consultants--is reporting increased business,” said David Saddler, a spokesman for the trade group. “For some it’s terrific; for some it’s small. But people aren’t being swamped.”

Altogether, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that new spending on security inside the United States, public and private, could increase inflation enough to slow the economy’s growth by 0.1% a year. That may not sound like a lot, but it means $10 billion less economic production in the first year alone.

Love Majors was in his office at Compass Bank in Carrollton, Texas, near Dallas, when the phone call came: The Air Force ordered him to leave his job signing up merchants for Visa and MasterCard--and spend a year as a firefighter at an air base in New Mexico.

“My wife used a few choice four-letter words when I told her,” he said. “I’m taking quite a hit financially.”

The worst part, Majors said, is the feeling that the rest of the country has returned to normal--and forgotten that thousands of reservists have upended their civilian lives to help defend the country.

“At the beginning, people were great. Some of the people at the bank sent me a care package--Hershey’s Kisses, peanut butter brittle, a disposable camera, a phone card,” he recalled. “But that was early on. It’s beginning to dissipate. They’re starting to forget about me now. We’re all being a little forgotten.”

Back home in Carrollton, all his neighbors put flags on their houses after Sept. 11.

“Most of them have been put away now. But mine is still up. As long as I’m deployed out here, the flag stays.”