Interesting article in Slate today, describing the fact that even though 3,000 or so people were killed on 9/11, most of them American citizens, relatively few of us (meaning the rest of us Americans) actually directly know anyone who was killed—even in New York. I can stand testament to that, since I know several people who live in New York, and as far as I know, none of my friends in NYC know anyone who has died, and like the Slate-sters, we come from the same pool of “elite college, financially oriented” people who largely populated the World Trade Center during the work day.
Personally, I myself know no one who has died; I live in Ohio, which narrows the possibility, but on the other hand several of my clients are in NYC, and much of my work is directly financially related. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, one of the firms that I write financial brochures for was located in the WTC—in Tower 2, to be precise. But I don’t know any of those people personally since I don’t work for the firm directly; I work as a subcontractor for a marketing firm. I do know a few people in my professional sphere who know people who have died—one client of mine had four friends who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, who as you probably know lost several hundred employees in the attack. But again, that’s one step removed. The Slate article, interestingly, notes that 80 percent of Americans are like me and know someone who knows someone who died—”we are all mourners at the second degree,” the article says.
The existence of the story is due to the dissonance that so many of us have felt between how we’ve reacted to the attacks and how, rationally, we feel it is appropriate to feel. Basically, the gist of the article, so far as I got it, was: “If I don’t know anyone who died, why do I feel so bad?” (there is also a more egotistical, self-aggrandizing subtext to the article that asks “I went to good schools and make a good amount of money, so how could I not have known someone who died?” But let’s ignore that one for now). Many people feel uncomfortable with grief if there’s no personal connection; it feels inappropriate, and also, it feels unfocused. If someone you know has died, you have someone to focus your emotions on. If you don’t, you just walk around in a crappy mood for days.
Generally speaking, I wholeheartedly agree with the philosophy that grief is best reserved for those you know and care about personally. I never mourn the death of celebrities, even those I admire, because I don’t know them, and while I have been sad in several cases that this means there is no more output from that particular person, and that a singular mind that I know of has been lost, mourning the death as a personal tragedy is not my purview. I felt a mild twinge at Kurt Cobain, but that was a zeitgeist thing. I got over it in about ten seconds. It sounds callous to put it that way, of course, but remember: I didn’t know Kurt Cobain. Really, it shouldn’t have taken me more than ten seconds to move on.
But the 9/11 attacks are a singular event. 3,000 men and women died in the WTC and Pentagon attacks (not to mention the several dozen in Pennsylvania) which is an enormous number of people to have died at one time for any reason at all. That’s going to be a shocker, to be sure—but it’s not enough for grief. Let’s hypothesize that 3,000 people died because of a terrible hurricane scouring across Florida and the gulf states. Americans would be horrified, of course. And we would be generous in helping those in need. But as a nation, we wouldn’t be grieving. If one plane had somehow hit a World Trade Center tower by accident, causing a collapse of one or possibly both of the towers, again, we’d be shocked first and generous second. But we wouldn’t be walking around with heavy hearts for weeks.
I think we grieve because we don’t know those who died—because we know that those who performed the attacks didn’t know them either, and wouldn’t have cared if they had. I think we grieve because we know the attackers would have been happy to replace any of the thousands who died and thousands more who were wounded with any of us. We are interchangeable to them; they don’t care which Americans they killed, they just wanted to kill Americans. And to that extent, they did the job: The casualty list of the attacks cut a demographic swath through our land. White, black, Hispanic, Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheist, gay, straight, rich, poor, middle class, Democrat, Republican, new immigrant, old money, war-monger and pacifist. It just didn’t matter. More Americans to kill. I don’t think it takes anything away from those who died to say that on a fundamental level who they were made no difference to their killers—they were meant to represent any of us, to be any of us. And they were.
This is why it’s right and appropriate to grieve their passing, to feel the pain of their absence, even if you didn’t know a single one of those people yourself. Look at the next person you see: But for time, location and personal circumstance, that person could be under the rubble. Look at your co-workers. Look at your family. Look at your child. Look at yourself. But most of all, look at anyone. That’s who the target was. They just happened not to be in the buildings or on the airplanes. We grieve because we’re all Americans, and in a real sense, it is a personal loss.
I watched Osama bin Laden and his odious lackey yesterday talk about how wonderful it was the towers went down and the Pentagon was hit, and all I wanted was a good five minutes in a room with either one of them and a lead pipe with a little heft to it. A lot of us have been going around and around about the root causes of the sort of terrorism that lead to these attacks, with not a few suggesting that America bears some responsibility for the chain of circumstances that brought planes and buildings together. I may be willfully obtuse, but just right now I can’t see how or why that should matter, as regards hunting down these people. These people want me dead. They want my wife dead, my daughter dead, my family and all my friends dead too. If we’d been in the towers, they’d be happy we were buried beneath them.
Regardless of how these people came to believe these things, it’s time for them to be stopped. I don’t know anyone who died on September 11, but I know who was attacked. I was, and so were you. This is personal.