I no longer read the Daily Kos, but an aquaintance sent me a copy of a column. The author, using the pen-name “Something the dog said”, wrote the following:
Yes, the 9/11 attacks were horrific, but they were more about optics than actual harm. The economy was already taking a hit before the Twin Towers fell. The reaction of the nation to seeing two major buildings in New York fall on T.V. has boosted the attack out of proportion. While the loss of even a single life is to be condemned and the devastation these deaths caused the families of those killed (sic), more than this number of teens are killed every year in car crashes. These are also tragic losses but we do not make the kind of high profile issue of it that the 9/11 attacks are.
Why would the writer equate purposely killing 3000 people in ONE BLOW with a yearly number of accidental deaths? Perhaps s/he wasn’t personally and devastatingly affected by it, so the deaths were equivalent in their effect on him.
Or perhaps s/he felt that the net sum of the event was zero. As someone living outside a “target rich” environment, I appreciate that the odds of death by terrorist act is lower than death by drunk driver. This lack of immediacy is why, as children, we often struggled to understand dangerous situations. Children not only lack experience, but they live in a fantasy-rich world. Often they have a childish fantasy of invincibility, as if they can run across a highway faster than the car bearing down on them.
But adults are expected to wrap their minds around situations outside their experience. To be unable to anticipate danger is a liability. To live in a fantasy is a psychological illness.
A few months after 9/11, I spoke to an acquaintance who said 3000 didn’t seem like a lot of people. I pointed out that his town, a “bedroom community” of commuters who drive to more urban areas only for work, had roughly 4000 residents. It would be like a single event wiping out his 3/4 of his friends and neighbors.
His response was to joke that things were getting crowded in his neighborhood. I found him unsettling. Please understand: I know gallows humor and I have employed it myself. But this wasn’t gallows humor. He wasn’t considering his own mortality. In his mind, he would somehow be spared if disaster struck. More creepy was the sense I got that he couldn’t get his mind around the immensity of 3000 deaths because, to him, those other people weren’t real.
That, I fear, is what the “dog was saying”.