Ditto. The number of actual deaths in B is much, much greater than that in A.
The fact that most of them lived in other places in the world and worshipped in ways very different from me…well, I’m not very tribal, I guess. The fact is that tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who God loved every bit as much as those who died on 9/11 died because of the Bushian exploitation of 9/11.
Corporate media. It’s all about selling the message. People dying of smoking doesn’t sell papers/advertising/commercials like a “terrorist attack!” does. Too gradual! Might not make the sweeps!
I picked Option B, but I had been worries about a 9/11 type of incident for decades before it actually happened, for an Option B type of reason, and when it happened it was milder by far than it could have been.
I was visualizing a homemade Hiroshima-sized nuke, actually.
We lose approximately 3000 Americans every month in car crashes alone. It takes about 3 days for smoking to kill 3000 Americans.
Though despicable, the actual terrorist attack was a tiny pinprick.
The rest of the balloon bursting was 100% our self-inflicted wound. It’ll easily be a century putting what the United States stood for back together again. … If we succeed.
It serves to remember that the estimates for casualties were for 30 - 40,000. The early hour helped keep the number down. A nuke or dirty bomb would be devastating.
By any measure imaginable, the fallout has caused the most suffering, and will continue to cause more suffering long into the future. So Option B was the clear winner for me.
I am surprised that Option A has so many votes.
Bingo. To put it in perspective, since 9/11/2001, something like a third of a million Americans have died it automobile accidents. The number killed by our own bad habits (smoking and unhealthy eating) is incalculably higher. Even though every single one of those three thousand was a terrible loss, the magnitude of 9/11 is beggared by the millions of terrible losses since then.
I suppose it would be harder to answer if someone I had personally known had been in the World Trade Center, or on any of those planes.
But I think the biggest loss was the loss of freedoms that have happened since then.
There is a fine line between security and paranoia.
There is also a fine line between defense and aggression.
9/11 was a very, very sad day.
But every day since 9/12 has been a slippery slope under the guise of “homeland security”.
One of the reasons I don’t visit here much.
This is a false dichotomy.
Even if that would have been the case (30-40k), car accidents in aggregate are STILL deadlier that year.
Boy, you really lapped up that groupthink and propaganda of the Bush Era republican nationalist drive to war, didn’t you? It’s simply not true. There was no large percentage of the world that wanted to see the U.S. destroyed at the time of 9/11. The radicals who committed that represent such a small percentage of the greater world that’s it’s spurious bordering on ignorant to extrapolate that “a significant percentage of the world’s population will do anything to destroy our way of life and our country”. It’s like saying that since Timothy McVeigh was a white, Christian, right wing, military veteran that all white, Christian, right wing military veterans want t overthrow the US Government ala the Turner diaries (however I’m sure that is more and more true with the advent of the Teabaggers and the ironic radicalization of our country… yes, I’m afraid we reacted just as they hoped…)
I will admit that we escalated and perhaps broadened that sentiment with our retaliatory actions, since 9/11.But the paranoia that people want to destroy the US and its way of life is simply the excuse and paranoid dementia that was used to whip people into a war froth and frenzy… that you believed that makes you a tool…literally a tool of nationalism.
I’m not sure I get why we’re equating one with the other.
I’m sad for anyone who’s murdered simply because he happens to be born in a certain place, whether he is American or Bosnian or Tutsi. Blind hatred stinks whether it’s an individual or an entire nation who’s targeted.
As far as the overreaction to the tragedy, I think it was sad but predictable. This is a country where restaurant coffee cups now have to be labeled “HOT!”, so you’d think we’d be used to overreacting. The responses in this very thread are a good indicator of how people respond when faced with tragedy: Some get confused, some get introspective, some get depressed, and most get angry and want to find someone to blame and kill him.
Personally, I’ll add option “c” to the poll and chose it:
c) The partisanship which followed a period of national and even international unity, which has further divided this country and caused people to cling even more fervently to their blind faith and irrational hatred of the “other side.”
I find myself more affected by the loss of the towers than the people, honestly.
That’s why I phrased it that way–so that our non-American posters could put it in the context of their own countries. So, if the same thing had happened in Australia, which part of it would you rather have taken back?
And they all fall under option B.
We’re not equating them. We’re sharing our opinions on which aspect of 9/11 we find personally more abhorrent.
I voted for b) - 3000 is small potatoes compared to the aftermath.
B for me, too. The attack was dreadful (but had the terrorists been a bit more competent and struck an hour or two later, would have been far worse) but to see the misplaced rage and bigotry nearly ten years later is more heartbreaking.
B, easily. Three thousand people dying sucks, but shit happens. It’s not that much in the grand scheme of things.
But the damage we allowed those in power to do to our country is lasting and affects hundreds of millions of people. Assuming we couldn’t have got people to support Iraq without 9/11, then the deaths and injuries and homelessness and strife and costs all massively outweigh 3000 deaths. The damage to our reputation internationally is substantial. Our debt will burden an entire society for years to come. The powers we allowed the government to take will most likely never be rescinded. Lots of what absolutely fucked our country over during the Bush years stems from the blind faith that people wanted to put in our government after the attacks.
Iraq was obviously in Bush/Cheney’s plan from the start (see PNAC, etc.) but they probably wouldn’t have ever been able to get enough support for such a ridiculous war without “patriotic” hysteria in the aftermath of 9/11. So even if you just want to compare death count to death count, Iraq far outdoes 9/11 (unless you think 3000 Americans are worth more than hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) without even needing all of that other stuff. You could up the death count of 9/11 by an order of magnitude and B would still be an easy answer.
I would have answered the same - but now reading through the thread and seeing arguments in favour of option B, I’m questioning my own answer. The way I first took the question I saw option B to represent all the non-death aspects of the attack (as soldier/Iraq civilian deaths aren’t specifically mentioned in the poll option) but now that I have a proper think about it, I’m on the fence as to which I would choose.
Either way it would be the same answer whether it happened in the US or Australia - but then I have to consider whether the reaction and fallout would have been vastly different had a 9/11-type tragedy occured in Australia rather than the US.
It’s basically a difficult question.
Unfortunately, a lot of Americans probably do.
Sorry, I thought that was clear from the explanation in the OP. We’re only allowed 100 characters for poll options, so while I’d originally explicitly included all the further deaths, both directly related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and those that have happened as a result of people having been encouraged to further terrorist activities by our actions, in option B, I had to cut that bit out. Which is why I clarified in the OP that option A was specifically about the attack itself and option B was everything that came out of it.
Indeed.
Even if you count Iraqi lives at 0 per, globalsecurity.org puts the total US military deaths in Iraq at more than 4,200 as of December '09.