September 11th in Perspective

8 years ago this morning, I woke up, got ready for work, kissed my wife and baby girl goodbye and, humming to myself, plopped into my black 1990 Ford Taurus to go to work in Silicon Valley. The first things I heard out of the radio were simply unbelievable. NPR was reporting that airplanes had run into skyscrapers in NY.

At the office, we had 2 TVs tuned to the news. I watched one of the towers crumble on live TV. I was struck with horror, and thought to myself, "This will be known as some kind of terrible Tuesday forever." I had watched people die on TV. It made my skin crawl to realize it.

The unity and grief I felt were real and visceral. I was shell-shocked for the rest of the day, and took several weeks for my life, even on the left coast, to feel normal again. But normal was different - there was a war in Afghanistan and the whole world was behind us. Terrorism had suddenly become something that did not just happen in far away places any more.

Over the past 8 years, I've put 9/11 in a long list of obvious tragedies that never should have happened: Stalin starving the Ukrainians, the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Tokyo, Chernobyl, Rwanda. Those were all events that had a date. And most of them get press coverage. I've also added a long list of individual tragedies that do not receive similar attention: deaths from diabetes, drunk driving, child abuse, addiction, torture.

I will never have as deep a connection with 9/11 as I do with drunk driving. When I was working as an interpreter, I got a call from the Japanese consulate one evening. I had to call the family of an exchange student and tell them their daughter was not going to survive the night. I met them in the hospital later to discuss taking their child off life support. Death due to drunk driving is 100% preventable. It kills thousands of people each and every year, not just once. I have a similar personal connection with cancer and mental illness.

I do not expect anyone else to share my personal connections with these issues. Everyone has a life story that speaks to them uniquely. In my life story, 9/11 was a major event. Hearing a father wail in agony when I told him his daughter would not live was life changing. Talking a dear friend through a suicide attempt was life-changing.

So I don't begrudge people their desire to keep 9/11 as a private day of grief. In their life perspectives, that will always be a defining moment.

For me, who has been touched much more strongly by other life events, please allow me to put 9/11 in my own life perspective. A tragedy, certainly. But over 100,000 people have died from drunk driving in the last 8 years. 21,000 people die each year from lack of health care. Do 2,9993 individuals who died on the same day overshadow the same thousands that die on individual days? In my life perspective, they do not.

So think of 9/11 in your way, and I'll think of it in mine. We will probably never agree. And that's okay. We've lived different lives.