Americans are looking back on the horror and legacy of 9/11, gathering Monday at memorials, firehouses, city halls and elsewhere to observe the 22nd anniversary of the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil.
Commemorations stretch from the attack sites — at New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania — to Alaska and beyond. President Joe Biden is due at a ceremony on a military base in Anchorage.
His visit, en route to Washington, D.C., from a trip to India and Vietnam, is a reminder that the impact of 9/11 was felt in every corner of the nation, however remote. The hijacked plane attacks claimed nearly 3,000 lives and reshaped American foreign policy and domestic fears.
Traumatized an awful amount of people. Empathy should be the watch word of the day, though I’m not holding my breath.
Honestly after seeing how people reacted to a 9/11 worth of people dying per day during COVID, I’m having trouble finding empathy. I’m in my 40s and I remember the day clearly, I’m just too damn jaded now, it’s just another senseless death of people like mass shootings and other instances.
I have trouble understanding any of this? You have problems finding empathy for victims of terrorist attacks because a disease killed more? What do they even have in common in this context? Why do mass shootings prevent you from feeling empathy? Or was that line just another contextless cool-story-bro addon? What does your age have to do with any of this? If I read this correct you have had problems with empathy all throughout the decades.
Why even write a comment as bad as this?
Well since someone needs things spelled out to them because they don’t understand context, I’ll do it just for you.
Age was mentioned because most of the Internet trends younger so there were inevitably going to be comments about “well you probably weren’t old enough to remember”, no, I very much was
link between the pandemic, mass shootings and this was due to all of them were large death experiences, didn’t matter the cause, it’s the fact that we’ve become so accustomed to death through our (in)action leaves people jaded.
I don’t even know where you get the “cool-story-bro” part unless you’re just trying to sound “cool” yourself.
You do know terrorism is more than just a mass death -situation? You DO know that right? Please say you do. Also please say it isn’t normal for you to destruct complex issues into simple black and white matters for them to be examined out of context. You’re too old for that kinda stuff and I would expect better from someone with that many years under their belt, even though you seem to lack any hint of empathy towards anyone
The deaths from COVID are higher in number, but have had less of a societal shift (although it probably should have resulted in one). There were all the days afterward where we all expected to be attacked again at any time. People were absolutely terrified. That took a huge psychic toll on the nation. People were literally getting PTSD because they expected Bin Laden to attack again and maybe with a dirty bomb this time. The government pushed through the Patriot Act with almost unanimous consent. And suddenly, we were at war in Afghanistan and 200,000 people were killed in that war.
9/11, as they say, changed everything. And that isn’t literally true, but things seriously changed in the U.S. and not for the better.
I’m your age, I get the angle you’re coming from. But I think you’re confusing desensitization with lack of empathy.
People don’t process tragedies like this the same. It’s a fucked up fact of human psychology. Seeing a horrific, scary, very rare event like planes crashing into the towers has way more impact on the typical person than reading about numbers without the scary event visuals. It sucks, but that’s how the human brain works.
I knew two people who died on board Pan Am 103. The younger brother of one of them died in a freak accident when he was only 7 or 8 years old.
My brother knew people who were at the airport in Rome on the day of the 1985 terrorist attacks.
Years ago my brother and I figured we knew folks that were impacted by half a dozen or so different terrorist attacks prior to 9/11. So yeah, I’m a bit jaded as well.
We did know somebody who almost flew out of Boston on that hijacked flight. She had a ticket on the same flight the next day, and her boss had pushed her to fly out a day earlier. Luckily she didn’t…
Compassion is a better word than empathy.
Most people don’t know what empathy means because they confuse it with sympathy. We’re only saying it now because of the snowball effect of our vernacular.