Wednesday, September 11, 2002
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Wednesday, September 11, 2002 |
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Sept. 11: history's awful perspective By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE Have we just lived through the most difficult year in America's history? For most of us, it would seem so. Beginning with the unspeakable events that are remembered simply by a date Sept. 11 the blows kept coming. How much more could we endure? The anthrax scare. A collapsing economy. Corporate greed robbing workers of their future. Children snatched from their own homes. Threats of a war unauthorized by Congress, the people. Without for a moment minimizing the horrors of the past 365 days, I think it is important to find a frame of reference in which to fit them. We need to try to step out of the present and set this year next to other moments in the long history of humankind. This year has not been unique. An estimated 40 million people in Europe and Asia died during the bubonic plague beginning in 1348. From 1917 to 1920, nearly 20 million died of influenza, 500,000 in the U.S. alone. In 2001, nearly two of every 10 babies born in Angola died before they reached their first birthday. (Only 3.4 of every 1,000 died in Sweden.) Citizens of most African countries will not reach 40. (Those of the little nation of Andorra may expect to live 83 years, six months.) Sources vary, but it would appear that 3,062 died in terrorist attacks Sept. 21, 2001. Beginning July 3, 1863, about 7,000 died in a single engagement on farmland outside of Gettysburg, Pa. And in November of 1948, a Chinese army evacuation ship exploded and sank off southern Manchuria with a loss of about 6,000. At Pearl Harbor an event remembered simply as a place name 2,403 died. More than 27,000 children, in places we do not know by name, die of starvation, malnutrition, or lack of clean water every day. That figure may be easier to grasp than 10 million per year. Six million Jews were exterminated in Europe. Upwards of 200,000 civilians died in Hiroshima (another event forever known by place name). Ten thousand have perished because of a toxic release in Bhopal, India, in 1984. The thing that all of the grinding statistics above had in common, it is probably safe to say, is that each of those unknown millions was known to someone and almost certainly loved by someone. They mattered to another human being or perhaps to many. For each of those deaths, there was almost certainly at least one broken heart. Not a single one of them was more or less important than any other. No more nor less important than those human beings we have lost in our own personal histories. Grandparents. Parents. Siblings. Husbands or wives. Our own children. What will set Sept. 11 apart when the sorry history of humankind is viewed from the distance of time? One can only conjecture. The fact that we were real-time eyewitnesses to these horrors will surely lead the list. Our instant comprehension of what was happening: Survivors of the millions who died in the 14th century Black Death could not have possibly known the extent of the devastation they were suffering. When one out of 10 people in this valley town died, could their survivors know that the same grief, the same suffering was haunting the village beyond the mountain, or the market town where the river forks? Our belief that nothing remotely like this had ever happened on American soil before. True only if our view is limited to modern times. Was it less horrendous to the red-skinned nation to have whole settlements torched, families massacred, diseases sown in the name of claiming new lands for Christianity? Our naiveté as Americans: We can't believe anyone could hate us, the most open-handed do-gooders in history forgetting that we are also the most profligate users and despoilers of earth's resources. And the fact that those lost on Sept. 11 were known to us, personally, intensely, by year's end. Television cameras panned across their faces posted in the streets by desperate families who didn't want to believe the worst. The media portrayed for us their lives as firefighters, investors, air travelers, secretaries, security guards, spouses, fathers, sisters. For me it was the contrast between the faces in the pictures most caught in a moment of exaltation, a graduation, a birthday and the grieving, searching expressions of those facing them. I remember reading about a commuter who used to greet the image of a man he had never met as he left his subway every morning, re-entered it in the evening. On the morning he emerged and discovered the pictures had been removed, he was plunged into grief as intense as he had experienced on Sept. 11. The now-familiar stranger had "died" all over again. Time. It will be a long, long time before we have processed Sept. 11, and longer still surely beyond our lifetimes before that day's events take their rightful place in history's parade of human atrocities. And only time will heal us. [Contact columnist Sallie Satterthwaite via e-mail SallieS@Juno.com.]
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