Psychological First Aid: The Hallmark Company, Greeting Cards, and the Response to September 11

The greeting card industry specializes in selling emotion. Joyce C. Hall, who in 1910 founded Hallmark Cards, wrote, "We realized ... that ours was a sensitive business. The shared sentiment a greeting card represents opens lines of communication that might otherwise be closed. A greeting card can create, enhance, and often rebuild friendships and associations" (qtd. in Robinette 142-43). In essence, Hall, who began his business in Kansas City, Missouri, toting a shoebox filled with postcards, understood that his company was not simply selling greeting cards. It was also selling relationships. In 1944, Hallmark coined its popular slogan, "when you care enough to send the very best." Subsequently, it established its brand promise for its target customers: "to be the very best at helping people express their feelings and strengthen the important relationships in their lives" (Robinette 45). Perhaps at no time was this more necessary than in the aftermath of the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked four US commercial airliners and began collision courses across the Eastern seaboard. All told, 3,047 died in disasters at Somerset County, Pennsylvania, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and, most notably, the Twin Towers in New York City, making September 11 the second bloodiest day in American history, behind only the battle of Antietam during the Civil War ("Officials" par. 18). In addition, thousands of others were injured, or their homes or businesses destroyed or damaged. However, these victims, their families, friends, and rescue workers were not the only ones affected. In an age characterized by the mass media's rapid dissemination of stories and images, news of the September 11 disaster reached millions of people via television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet, triggering an instant connection to the catastrophe and initial feelings of shock and numbness at the magnitude of the loss (Corr, Nabe, and Corr 219). According to T. A. Rando, a death or loss is categorized as "traumatic" if it includes certain elements such as (a) suddenness and lack of anticipation; (b) violence, mutilation, and destruction; (c) preventability and/or randomness; (d) multiple death; and (e) the mourner's personal encounter -withe death, where there is either a significant threat to personal survival or a massive and/or shocking confrontation with the death and mutilation of others. (568-69) The losses experienced by Americans on September 11 fit this pattern and led to a complicated mourning period. Television in particular best informed the public about the horrific, death-related event and its aftermath (Corr 85). Uneasy Americans watched as New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and other political and religious leaders coordinated rescue efforts and tried to help to make sense of the sudden, unexpected, and violent deaths (Corr 72, 78), and they wondered which target would be next. As Ray B. Browne and Arthur B. Neal assert in their introduction to Ordinary Reactions to Extraordinary Events, [w]ith the globahzation of popular culture, the scope of events and the range of personalities that can become the objects of public attention are substantially greater than they used to be. Remote places and happenings intrude into consciousness with increasing frequency, and the activities of everyday life become refocused and extended. (11) The September 11 atrocities ripped into the nation's cultural fabric, and as the nonprofit RAND Corporation discovered in its study of stress-related symptoms following the attack, nine out of ten Americans reported at least one symptom of stress, while half reported one or more substantial symptoms of stress so severe as to interfere with their lives (Kastenbaum 12). Thus, Americans mobilized, seeking ways to cope and heal, and to give aid and comfort to those most devastated by the tragedy. In Death, Society, and Human Experience, Robert J. …