We’ve been talking about 9/11 for 20 years now, every year on the anniversary.
Writing about it, tweeting about it, remembering.
It’s difficult to imagine that even today, if I were on Twitter, I would still find people saying that 1/6 was worse than 9/11. I’ve argued with people like that, being unable to figure out the thought process which would result in them believing an event which resulted in fewer than 10 deaths and zero buildings destroyed is somehow not only comparable, but actually worse, than an event which resulted in upwards of 3000 people* dying and two famous buildings destroyed.
Oh, they’ll tell me why they believe what they do, at least as far as they know. I’ve been told that Bin Laden wasn’t able to come close to overthrowing the US government the way the 1/6 rioters were. The idea that there was any danger of the government being overthrown on 1/6 is pretty ridiculous when you think about it--in the same way that a large group of people barging into a police station and occupying it can’t possibly result in the mob being in charge of the police force from then on--but that’s what more than one person has claimed to believe.
Having written nothing for over a week and feeling like I should get into the habit, I’m writing something for 9/11 now, as though there weren’t enough takes on the date and its events being written already. But I might have just come up with something original enough to be worth the time of whoever might stumble onto it.
Because at some point in the last week, I asked myself a question, part of which is in the title.
Here’s the question I asked myself:
“Were a majority of Americans more horrified by the fact that thousands of people had been killed, the collapse of the World Trade Center, and the repercussions for the city of New York that the collapse resulted in?
“Or were they most horrified by the fact that there was an attack on their country? Not on a military base in the Middle East or in Europe or in Asia, not on one of their ships like the USS Cole, but on American soil, targeting American landmarks? That a place which was supposed to be safe from attack…got attacked, and partially destroyed?”
Human life is obviously much more important than the symbolism of a country, or a building. People should realize that. But when people are emotional, they don’t always think clearly. I know that I sure don’t.
For a long time, I simply assumed that everybody thought the same way that I did. That they all looked back on 9/11/2001 with sorrow, rage, etc because so many people died.
If I throw away that assumption, however, and instead consider that perhaps it was never “OMG they killed 3000 of our people, those monsters!” But rather “OMG, those monsters attacked my COUNTRY! I can handle 3000 people dying if they die somewhere ELSE. That happens all the time. But not here! Not in New York City!”
Considering that possibility, it’s easier to get into the heads of people who say 1/6/2021 was even worse than 9/11.
To them, people attacked the sacred United States of America on both dates. Regardless of the results, the very fact that any attack took place at all is jarring by itself.
In 2001, a place that was supposed to be safe from attack turned out not to be. In 2021, another place that was supposed to be safe from attack turned out not to be.
As I think about what to write next, I find myself getting a little bit angry, because I find myself thinking about how people seem to have been conditioned to value certain lives over others.
Oh, I know that this isn’t news, because we already know that a president starting a war in which American troops die faces a lot more backlash than a president who starts a war in which the only people killed aren’t American. But think about this for a minute: it isn’t just that so many Americans don’t care about the lives of foreigners. It’s that they don’t even care about the lives of other Americans sometimes. Or perhaps it may be more accurate to say that they care about some American lives a lot more than others.
The people who say that 1/6 was worse than 9/11, most of them probably don’t know the names of anybody who died on 9/11. Not unless they knew the deceased personally. But the same people know all about the politicians in the Capitol building, worship them as celebrities even. So it wasn’t just a case of America being attacked for them, but it was also a case of their heroes being menaced. AOC’s histrionics since then (“You tried to MURDER ME, Ted Cruz! And also, I effectively served in a war on that day!”) haven’t exactly helped anybody to put things in perspective.
So. Politicians like AOC and the rest matter to a certain segment of the population more than average people. The same segment of the population can only be bothered to give two shits about a mass murder if it happens in a certain place, and even then it isn’t “people have died” which upsets them the most.
Am I the only one who finds that troubling?
Or maybe I’ve reached the wrong conclusions. Maybe there’s other reasons why we have had people saying that 1/6 was much worse, ones that I haven’t thought of. Hell, it took me long enough to even consider the ones I wrote about here, and I can’t prove my theory.
If so, somebody needs to explain those other reasons to me. Because I can’t wrap my head around it.
And in closing, something I don’t need to guess about at all is that after any kind of attack that horrifies the entire country (or at least 50% of it), people get scared shitless and they become open to all kinds of measures to prevent anything like it from happening again which they would never be open to otherwise.
9/11 gave us legalized torture, legalized indefinite detention without trial, warrantless surveillance, two wars (to start with!), etc.
I don’t know what all 1/6 is going to result in other than increased funding for the police in Washington, DC, but history should teach us to be worried.
* Since originally posting this, I’ve learned that the actual number of dead was a little bit under 3000. They just rounded up.