What was saddest/worst/other superlative thing about 9/11? If you had the chance to erase one aspect of history but not the other, which one would you pick?
Note that the 100-character poll answer limit doesn’t allow me to put nearly as much detail as I’d like in there. Go ahead and assume that everything boils down to:
A.) The original attack.
B.) The massive clusterfuck fallout from and terrible reactions to Option A.
Anything other than the loss of life, destruction of the towers, and so on would fall under the heading of the “etc.” in the second option.
Sorry, people who don’t like binary choices; you’re stuck on this one. I’m sure some people will be eager to argue with the phrasing of the second option, too.
Inspired by a discussion tangent exemplified by this post. Also a reboot of this thread; the poll question was phrased the opposite way from the thread title, so people were answering differently based on which one they were reading. Thanks to **samclem **for helping out.
I think what makes it a *slightly *easier decision for me is that Option A was done *to *us. Option B was something we did to ourselves–or was at least done to us by people who should have known better.
That’s more or less how I feel–a terrorist attack on America that results in a loss of life is tragic, but ultimately it doesn’t directly damage “America” the concept and the set of beliefs/structures/ideologies that make “America” better than average.
The stuff in B, on the other hand, is nothing more and nothing less than a giant, cancerous tumor right smack in the middle of the Bill of Rights and rapidly metastasizing. And that IS directly damaging the country that I love that no loss of a fraction of a percent of our country’s population could do.
I grieve for those who lost their lives. Their deaths were a senseless tragedy. However, the idiocies since then done in their names have been far more damaging to both America and the world.
I think you are mixing too much in the 2nd option. The loss of freedom and spending on the war both bother me, as does the tremendous cost to the economy. I think that dwarfs the actual people killed, as horrific as it was. I think what s amazing is the *lack *of bigotry following the attack. As much as I disliked Bush, he explicitly called on Americans to not vilify all Muslims. There were some isolated cases of vandalism, but less than what a happens after a sports team wins a national title.
The loss of life was the saddest thing about 9/11. The incompetent and misdirected reaction was the saddest thing about the contemporary administration and the populace who went along with it.
The deaths and the day itself for me. When I heard Kevin Cosgrove’s phone call or saw the video of the jumpers from the Moussaoui trial and tried to imagine that horror of that day for thousands more people, each with a story just as horrific…to this day I can’t wrap my mind around it.
I chose option 1, although I’m an Australian so they weren’t citizens of my country as the wording of the sentence states - but I don’t think that makes any difference at all.
The deaths, but there was a lot more that 3000. More soldiers than that died in Iraq. The figure for civilian deaths in Iraq are debatable but they are huge.
Option B. As SFG notes, the first was a dreadful thing, but similar to many other dreadful things that have happened in the world - a lot of people were killed for a bad reason.
The second, however, seems to have broken many of the things that used to make the US great. I find myself wondering if future historians will ask whether this was a major downward turning point in US history. Then you factor in the misdirected wars, and the deaths of both US and non-US people. Plus the fact that the bad guys are still out there.
Word. And the worst part is, we did it to ourselves.
Try living in Arizona. You know, where a nutter killed a Sikh because he was wearing a turban. And starting in a couple days, you can get pulled over for Driving While Brown.
But, also the realization that there is such raw hatred for America.
America isn’t perfect. However it is an immigrant country. Melting pot is an accurate description. We have people of all religions from every country in the world. Including a significant Muslim population.
It’s disturbing to realize a significant percentage of the world’s population will do anything to destroy our way of life and our country. It still makes me nauseous to think about it.
Choice 2. In a country this size, 3000 people is insignificant. On September 10-12 2001, more Americans died from cigarette smoking than terrorism. During 2001, more Americans died by wandering into unguarded swimming pools than terrorism, and this group was predominantly little children. Why are our priorities so easily hijacked by political dicks?