9/11 - Three Days & Fourteen Years After

The following is in response to a very dear friends Facebook post on 9/11. It was a great piece and carefully thought out. If you'd like, here is the link to her Facebook post.

I read your Facebook post - it's the only thing I've read since this morning. I've avoided everything I could to no good result as everyone has something to say including Chase's CEO Jamie Dimon. That's not in anyway to diminish your message as it's a good one. But all of it seems a bit much somehow and yet not quite enough of the right things. There are too many clips of the planes crashing into the towers and almost nothing about the individual people who died.

After sobbing for a while for the fourteenth year in a row and wondering why when I knew absolutely no one who perished that day I've come to the conclusion that it just doesn't matter because 3000 people, PEOPLE, died that day. And what a horrific way to go. Some of them plummeting to a certain death rather than be incinerated. Others crushed by the weight of those towers collapsing on them. How do we know? We watched over and over and over hoping for a different outcome. Hoping that by some miracle someone could have survived all the while we were playing out Einstein's maxim about the definition of insanity.

To say we as a species are flawed and capable of unspeakable horror seems to also be a disservice because I also know we can be quite capable of immeasurable kindness and bravery of which I've been the recipient of both traits. But I have to wonder about a society that doesn't see that the loss we suffered when those planes came crashing down is almost nothing compared to the devastation Japan experienced when nuclear bombs crashed into two of their cities. "The two bombings, which killed at least 129,000 people, remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history." According to Wikipedia. 

I guess the bottom line for me isn't who the perpetrator was as much as knowing so many people lost their lives over government or religious ideology. (And no, I don't believe the conspiracy theories.)  There are lessons to be learned but instead we seem to be intent on exacting a revenge. Or worse, wallowing in a social media pile of self-pity & righteous indignation.