jstraw, I agree that everyone was affected in their own way that day, and that we all empathize with the families of those lost. It's not the legitimacy of feelings that has a hierarchy. It is the life-altering experiences of that day that have a hierarchy. To imply everyone experienced even remotely the same thing is like saying people IN a car accident experience the same thing as those who WITNESS a car accident. I would equate my own experience to that of a pedestrian that dove out of the way of a fatal accident and then tried to assist the injured and recover the dead.
To imply you and I experienced that day in even a remotely similar way is simply BS. You didn't watch people brace themselves in a window with your own eyes, hear the thump when the bodies hit, run for your life when 2 WTC came down, experience complete darkness for 20 minutes until the cloud cleared while you were choking on dust and feeling the rumble as the other tower collapsed, not knowing if it was coming your way, see the huge see of abandoned shoes left by people who kicked them off and ran for their lives, spend the afternoon clawing at debris with your hands or a bucket, guided only by the chirping sound of the firemen's personal emergency beacons, finding only small parts of bodies. Similarly, I did not experience the loss of a family member, and cannot begin to imagine the trauma of those who did. I certainly attended enough funerals of friends and acquaintances.
I am far from the top of it, but let's face facts, there IS a hierarchy of what people took away from that day. I have the chest X-rays and respiratory function test scores to quantify some of what I took away. I was lucky. Others only ended up with a death certificate.
In the same way I can imagine what the folks in the planes and the towers felt, you can imagine what I experienced. But you can't KNOW what I experienced because you did not experience it. You don't wake up hearing the rumble of a falling building in a dream. You don't cough from respiratory ilnesses. You don't occasionally catch a whiff of the Trade Center fire when someone is torch-cutting steel and accidently ignites a piece of plastic. You didn't lose your North Star for getting home from the bar (keep the WTC on my right and I'd hit the PATH train). You probably don't look at every airliner flying over your city thinking it's just a little TOO fricking close, and why dont they change the airport approach patterns.
I'm not sure why you find it problematic to recognize those differences. |