Four years ago, in the aftermath of September 11, I moderated a focus group designed to see how Oakland County citizens were coping with the emotional trauma of the terrorist attacks.
One man there was an immigrant from Eastern Europe. I caught his eye, and knew what he was thinking. I knew a lot about his country. It had suffered terribly under oppressors, invaders and sadistic dictators. Afterwards, I talked to him.
For two hours, we had been in a room full of people who talked as if 9/11 was the worst tragedy in the history of the world.
“This is a very bad thing,” he told me cautiously, “but . . . you know … I did know what he was trying to say.
Many other places, including his native land, had suffered far worse many mornings before breakfast. But somehow, Americans secretly do believe that the rules are different for us.
The fact is that America never has had, by world proportions, a really major disaster. There was an earthquake in Armenia in 1988 that killed 55,000 people. There was one in China in 1976 that killed a quarter of a million people.
Together, those events got less press here than the San Francisco earthquake of 1989. The death toll there was 62.
But sooner or later, something horrendous will happen.
The laws of geology haven’t been repealed, and the shape of the earth is bound to change. Imagine what that means.
We need to prepare for disasters, but the real test comes only when they occur. When that day comes, we’ll all be like Blanche DuBois. We’ll all depend on the kindness of strangers.
And if we really do regard each other as strangers, I am afraid we’ll be doomed.
I liked this article; we traveled the northeast a week after "911" and saw a few notes about "God bless America" etc; I wasn't prepared for the way the media took the event to such limits. And those reasons were so unbelievable. I still think if those terrorists wanted to make an impression on "all america" they would have dropped a few planes on our stadiums.
Posted by: Bob Bosch | September 29, 2005 at 04:10 PM