Inspired by a thread in the pit where DiogenestheCynic pitted the media for the 911 hype, I find it strange how the media virtually controls what people think and do.
3000+ people died in a tragic incident on a particular day. That day becomes an anniversary.
Assuming that since it is not the destruction of the physical buildings of the WTC that is the cause of grief, what if the number of people who died that day had been less?
What if for some reasons, like the planes being empty, the day being a holiday, the towers not collapsing etc, only 2 persons had died? I am sure nothing would have happened. Comparatively speaking, the media would not have batted an eyelid. What if 10 had died? Not much even then I am sure. What if 20 had died? Hmmm…that would lead to some good coverage but certainly no “anniversary” would have been created. What if a 100 had died? Anniversary then?
Going by the above reasoning, is it therefore proper to conclude that this whole idea of anniversary commemoration is directly dependant on the number of people who die.
So first, what is the toll of deaths that gives rise to the day becoming an “anniversary”?
And what numbers of dead cause a proportional progress of commemoration of that “anniversary” from being carried out by a family to a community to a town, to a state, to a nation and eventually by the world?
Also, what if the same 3000 people had died in terrorist related incidents, but spread out over a much longer period of time? Would we still be seeing the same amount of anger, frustration and reaction? If not, why not?
English is not my native language. Therefore sorry if my communication is not clear.
I think the collapse of the World Trade Center is what makes it so memorable for me, not the amount of people that died.
An symbol of New York City and the U.S. collapsed, killing thousands.
If only a few people had been inside, it still would have been anniversary worthy.
May I just add that when it first happened, I thought the death toll was going to be 10,000+, so in one way, the casualties were less than I thought and I still remember it every year.
I remember on 9/11 I was flipping through all of the channels and watching the news everywhere when I hit the Christian station (I can’t remember which, I think it was TBN) - they said that the death toll was “at least 20,000.” :rolleyes:
The casualties were less than expected. My guess at the time was 30,000 - 50,000. I did not know that the WTC was mostly empty (since it was early in the work day), and a lot of people got out. Something like 16,000 people escaped the WTC. (I’m pulling figures from memory here.) In the winter of 2001/2002 one writer described the World Trade Center on 9/11/01 as the greatest rescue operation in history. He may be wrong, I’ve never checked, but it was nice to see something positive about that whole mess.
Remember, it took weeks to get an accurate count of the casualties. Early estimates were high, and there were many people on more than one list of the missing. In the immediate aftermath, rescue workers were focused on trying to find survivors while they still had a chance. Then the focus was on stabilizing the wreckage and the “bathtub” foundation, and on retrieving remains.
9/11 was a huge day in American history. The first attack on US soil by a foreign power in sixty years. The first attack on the continental US by a foreign power in nearly a century. The biggest terrorist attack against the US. Iconic buildings in two major cities martyred. Even if by some miracle nobody died except the scumbag hijackers, it was a day to remember.
It’s hard for me not to take 9/11 perosnally. I have a friend who escaped the the Pentagon that day. She’s fine. My wife and son were at the WTC in July 2001 - the pictures we have are invaluable. If the hijackers had struck a few months earlier, I’d be a widower now.
In comparison, while people living or working in the area tend to recognise the day when it rolls around, the first WTC bombings in 1993, or even the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 barely make it to the national radar any more (I am saying this as a Canadian, though, so my POV is somewhat skewed - I do watch American news channels occasionally, though!). If only the Pentagon had been hit on 9/11, I think it would have faded away in the national memory in a similar way. Just another crazy bombing. Frankly, if only one plane had hit one WTC tower (even if it collapsed) I don’t think it would have resonated in the national/international psyche in quite the same way. I think what tipped the scales was the SIZE of the attacks - everything happened so quickly, there was no time to react between the first indication that something was wrong (perhaps eyewitnesses seeing a plane flying too low in the city) to the moment when it was all over and 4 planes were down, 2 landmark buildings (plus the smaller adjacent ones) were gone forever, the Pentagon (THE PENTAGON!!!) was damaged and the realisation of the potential level of human casualties struck everyone. You don’t need to live in the city to understand that a LOT of people work in these massive buildings. Individually, while each event would have been tragic, they would not have been as shocking as the whole, completed in an hour and a half. I think America (and other countries with offices/employees in those buildings) were damn lucky that it was early enough in the work day to not have more victims.
So it wasn’t that the towers collapsed. It wasn’t that the Pentagon was hit. It wasn’t the actual number of casualties. It was all of it together, and the potential for a worse outcome that made the day so important. In the long run, there is also the fact that 2 wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) were started as a direct result of these attacks, and that Saddam Hussein (a historically important man) was captured. The impact on the rest of the world and to the history books of the future is a huge factor to it’s importance.
9/11/2001 was also primary election day and the first day of school for some, so a lot of people came to work late after going to vote and/or see their children off to school. If the planes had hit even an hour later, the death toll would have been higher
You can roll your eyes at that all you want- that number is actually conservative by what some of the network stations were talking about. Whatever station I was listening to - I think ABC, but it might have been CBS - made a point of mentioning several times that over 75,000 people worked at the WTC, and that on a regular workday, one could expect 50,000 people to be there.
Anyways, I don’t think actual casualty numbers were the reason for the impact the attacks had. I think it was both the shock of the scale of the attack (going after three major landmarks, obliterating one and damaging the other) and the fact that it was delivered in seperate, co-ordinated blows… what makes the day stick most in my mind was listening to the radio about all of the shit going down (some of which wasn’t even really occuring, like the reports of car bombs in front of the State Department or a fire at the White House, both of which were faulty witness reports regarding the Pentagon attack) and having an overwhelming dread of “What is going to happen next?”
The attack by McVeigh on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killed a lot of people as well, and saddened and shocked people, and there were memorials and anniversaries for that before 9/11. But I don’t think many people reacted to that attack with “What will those crazy militiamen do next?” There was a sense that this attack, while horrible, was an abberation: one guy pushed hard and got lucky, and there wasn’t another militia that both wanted to do this sort of attack or was competent enough to. Conversely, after twenty years of reading about terrorist attacks on Israel, at American buildings in Lebanon and Africa, on the USS Cole, and the poorly done first attack on the WTC, there was a sense that fanatical Muslim terrorists were out there, and they were organized, but they weren’t organized enough to attack America directly at home, or didn’t see that as furthering their goals.
Also, since you’re a non-American, it may be hard to get this across, but we don’t see ourselves as attached to the rest of the world. Having two huge oceans seperating us, and being generally self-sufficient and isolationist for our history, there’s a feeling that the rest of the world doesn’t really affect us or matter to us. It certainly doesn’t help that most of the people trying to make the rest of the world important to us want Americans to make serious sacrifices on behalf of other countries. And so, to some extent, 9/11 forced a sea change in American mentality akin to Pearl Harbor sixty years ago.
I don’t think you can ignore the effects of the means of destruction of the WTC, either. Because commercial airliners were hijacked, and used as missiles, the entire airline industry FROZE for several days. This means that many of us who didn’t know anyone who was killed, still know people who: were diverted to Canada (because they were over the Atlantic Ocean when the events took place), stuck in Hawaii for several additional days (One or two days hotel stay was comped by the hotel, then they had to start paying; if one could leave Hawaii and get to the Continental U.S. in a timely manner without flying, they would have) or forced to leave behind valuable carryon luggage (a Stradivarius Violin), canceled trips in the weeks after 9/11 or otherwise afffected by airlines.
This increases the degree to which the collapse of the towers did not take place in a vaccuum, and so the exact number of casualties is almost irrelavent to the impact the events had on people’s lives.
This wasn’t just “an attack.” First it was one plane. Then another plane. Then another plane at the Pentagon. Then another plane. And first one tower. Then another tower. Then another tower.
As the New York Times started the story on September 12th: It kept getting worse.
The use of aircraft as an effective missile was a one off, the coordination was impressive.
Seeing the USA attacked by external ‘forces’ operating internally was surprizing.
I reckon that the reaction would have been the same, even if the planes had been nearly empty and the towers totally empty.