Fast-and-dirty numbers

[redbird]

Someone said, in a discussion of Flight 93, that she thought it was unreasonable for most Americans, especially those who don't live within a day's drive of New York City, to have taken the 9/11 attacks personally or be traumatized thereby. She said that she thought most of the trauma was because of [I'd guess news] media "exploitation" of images of the attack. (I'm not linking this time, because the person who originally posted is seeming a little overwhelmed, and has asked that we drop that thread.)

I don't have an exact definition for a day's drive, but I did some quick proxy numbers, courtesy of the census. I figured that the number of people who live in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Delaware [thanks, Nancy], or Maryland would do as a very rough approximation: some parts of upstate New York and western Pennsylvania are a long day's drive from New York City, but some parts of Virginia are well within reach.

That's about 56 million people, or just over one out of every six Americans.

Now consider the mobility of modern Americans--there are a lot of people elsewhere in the U.S. who grew up here (my brother has lived in Texas for 20 years), have close family here, or both.

[Given that the original subject was Flight 93, not the two that hit New York, people in a day's drive of the Pentagon might reasonably be included as well, but I was in part just curious about where people live these days.]

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Nitpick: you can add another 800K for Delaware.

[redbird]

I think I did, and forgot to list the state. These are rounded-off, added-in-my-head, back-of-the-envelope numbers anyhow.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

Also, using the "six degrees of separation" meme, most people in this country are a connect or two from someone who was in New York that day. In my case, a close friend who no longer lives in the Twin Cities, a couple of cousins, people I know through fandom and Paganism.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Hell, I live in New Zealand and I know someone who lost zir partner in the WTC attacks.

[firecat]

she thought it was unreasonable for most Americans, especially those who don't live within a day's drive of New York City, to have taken the 9/11 attacks personally or be traumatized thereby. She said that she thought most of the trauma was because of [I'd guess news] media "exploitation" of images of the attack.

I live in San Francisco. never saw a single image because I vociferously avoided them, but I was pretty upset about it. I was also upset about the Tsunami a couple of years ago and hurricane Katrina last year, despite being pretty far away from the action in both cases. I don't see why it's unreasonable to have feelings about events that kill a lot of people all at once.

[gothgeekgirl.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've lived in Los Angeles since 1979, but grew up in NJ (my parents still live there) and did live in NYC for a while. On 11 Sept 2001 I was sitting in Heathrow Airport waiting to return home from a week and a half in the UK. (it was supposed to be 2 weeks, but family stuff happened so I'd shortened my trip. I got my 2 weeks anyway, returning home a day later than originally planned)

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

Well, Flight 93 was headed for SFO, so there were many Bay Area people on that plane. A young woman who was a junior at my college died on the flight.

[cheshyre]

Day's drive?

I can say for a fact that Boston to Tampa, FL is 25 hours nonstop.
And (though it's a slightly different route) Boston is ~4 hours from NYC.

[redbird]

I don't know her definition--I was assuming one driver, the need for at least brief stops (gas, bathroom, refill the water bottle), and sleep at some point. But yes, I could probably go as far south as the Carolinas, and include Maine and maybe everything as far west as Michigan--years ago, someone came from Benton Harbor to spend the weekend hanging out with, among other people, me and roadnotes. He said it was 13 hours' drive straight through, but I don't know how much over the speed limit he went, or how much that depended on getting lucky with traffic and such.

[jenett]

Now, granted, I grew up in Boston, where two of the flights originated, but...

One friend's father was in the Pentagon very near the area that got hit half an hour earlier. One of my high school classmates (I didn't know her at all well) was killed in the WTC. (As was her best friend from school's father, who was on one of the planes.) Said school was in MA, but a boarding school: I think both of them were from outside the East Coast originally.

An alum of the school I work at (and a relatively recent one: 10 years out of high school, I think?) was on one of the planes.

Plus, all the people I know who live and work in either DC or NYC, you included, whose daily habits I don't necessarily know well.

I was working at the current job on 9/11, here in the Twin Cities, and I know there were a number of students who had parents travelling for business (and often travelling to NYC or DC, in those cases), and many who have friends or family in one or both areas.

The 'parents fly for work' part may be a little unusual for the general Minnesota population (since, on average, parents of our students are more likely to have highpowered jobs that might require that kind of work travel than the general cross-section of the population) but the rest of it didn't strike people who knew me as weird, just 'not true for me personally'.

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

I worked for a company at the time which did a lot of business with a man who died in one of the towers. His wife phoned us that day to tell us what was going on. He was from Illinois.

It sounds as if the person who made the original comment was a provincial snob. Yes, I do mean provincial. New York is a province unto itself.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I didn't take the 9/11 attacks personally, nor was I especially traumatized by them, although I was shocked, saddened and concerned for those more directly affected. And I do think that some small part of the reason is that I was clear across the continent, which gave me some ability to distance myself, especially as the days went by.

But Idon't think that was the biggest part of it for me, nor do I assume assume that the same distancing effect would hold true for others. Emotional response is much more complex than that.

[maryread.livejournal.com]

And media-inflicted emotional trauma is different from "reasonable" reaction... how again? As the comments here suggest, many more people had "rational" connections to these events -- but I don't see how or why empathy for suffering would disqualify anyone from being an object of compassion. Like there's only so much compassion to go around and we mustn't waste it on the undeserving, but ration it? Au contraire. The more you make, the more you make. What goes around comes around.

Remember the first few days when crowds of people all over the world were heartbroken for New York? And now our government has built of this wretched experience a wall for true-blue americans to hunker down behind. Excuse me while I back off so as not to get tears in the keyboard.

I find the television advertisements for this movie, as well as the whole idea of making such a movie, both upsetting and shockingly tasteless. So I will drop it there.

[redbird]

That's fine--I've seen neither the ads nor the trailer, and have no plans to see the movie. But I was startled by the idea that one could draw a line around the city, and say "if you are inside this line, you can reasonably be upset by this. If you aren't, any trauma you feel is media-induced and the result of exploitation."

[miwasatoshi.livejournal.com]

I did not have any relatives who died that day. But my friends did.

Whoever said that must believe individuals live in a vacuum, but reality clearly dictates otherwise.

[redbird]

As far as I can tell, just about everyone draws one or more circles, in which the people inside are more important than the people outside. What I find weird is when people assume that they know where everyone else's lines are, or that they know where those lines should be, and that there's something wrong if someone draws their lines in a different place. There are set-definitions that I would consider problematic, but usually that's more to do with the sharpness of the distinction, the extent to which being outside means someone doesn't get treated with courtesy or fairness, than with who someone defines as "us."

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

What I find weird is when people assume that they know where everyone else's lines are, or that they know where those lines should be, and that there's something wrong if someone draws their lines in a different place.

That's so common, though.

Yeah, it gobsmacks me every time, too.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Philadelphia is not New York. But there are signs in Philadelphia pointing out that 1/4 of Americans live within a day's drive of Philadelphia, which I think they defined as 8 hours. There are really a LOT of people living along that coast. Even that doesn't count the people who once lived in New York and moved away.

I don't think that's the only reason people care so much about a place, or the only reason they *should* care. Cities have symbolic value to people who have never even seen them. (I was so disappointed with both Ithaca and Troy, after the millenia of media hype.) People care about sense of place -- not all people, and not all places, but enough stories accrete around New York to make it offensively wrong to say "Americans should not care about this."

[redbird]

The major stories about Troy are about war and destruction--that'll leave a mark on even the topless towers.

I think I would have been offended even if it had been "Americans should not care about Oklahoma City"--that is, if it hadn't felt dismissive of me and mine.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I was in London on the day of the attacks, and it definitely traumatised me. I was working at a company whose office was about 400 metres from Tower Bridge, right in the centre. We produced software for the financial markets, so amongst other things, we had a Reuters terminal, so we got to see the (unfiltered, uncensored) news as it went out over the network. It was quite frightening. Roads were reportedly gridlocked, so there wasn't much chance of getting anywhere quickly, and there were several rumours (on Reuters) that a plane was heading for London, and of course, Tower Bridge is one of the few landmarks that would be both symbolic and easy to find from the air. The person sitting behind me realised quite quickly that two of his friends were in the towers, and it later was confirmed that they both died.

Later, I realised that, almost exactly seven months previously, I had visited New York, visited the World Trade Center and actually walked on its roof, then took an internal flight from New Jersey to SFO, the identical route to Flight 93, though I think it may have been on a different airline. That knowledge, realising that it really *could* have been me, got to me more insidiously over a longer period of time. Coupled with the 7/7 bombings in London last year (I missed the bombs by arriving an hour later from Marseille, but my other half would have been on the Piccadilly Line train that was blown up, if she hadn't have left home late due to a headache that morning), this has made me more wary than I otherwise would have been, but I won't let it stop me doing things.

Having said that, being British, I was no newcomer to terrorist attacks, having grown up with the reality of the IRA and having been quite close to their bombs several times (I had a couple of close calls, one at Kings Cross and another in Oxford). I would almost certainly have taken 9/11 much worse without that, so whilst I had no lasting PTSD type responses to it, I was sufficiently shaken that I wasn't much use work-wise for a couple of weeks at least.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

*nods* I'm another London person who found it quite traumatic. My boss and I went back to our desks after the second plane hit and worked normally for the rest of that day - blitz spirit, don'cha know - but that doesn't mean we weren't shaken. Some of my friends lost someone, and I spent large parts of the next week helping to search survivor lists, which was quite an emotional experience.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Then I really shouldn't have reacted emotionally to the huge tsunami of 2004, that was on the other side of the planet!

(I've never even been to NY, barely to the east coast, but the scale of the attacks, all at once, with such savagery, affected me profoundly, and with no apologies.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I really, really hate the idea that some people don't have the "right" to be traumatized by certain things... as if PTSD were a privilege that people might try to claim when they didn't deserve it.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Well, I have seen people be the trauma equivalent of ambulance chasers. Someone very close to several of my best friends died a couple of years ago, and they were furious that suddenly people seemed to be coming out of the woodwork expounding on the depth of their grief, people who were never part of his life in any significant way. Maybe he touched people in surprising ways, but it did seem like there were some opportunists looking for the chance for public clothing-rending.

In general, though, I agree with your point.

[bibliotrope.livejournal.com]

Some of us in western Pennsylvania -- and nearby parts of western Maryland, West Virginia, and eastern Ohio, the region that generally and collectively identifies as "Pittsburgh" -- took 9/11 seriously, and personally, because of Flight 93, which crashed here. Shanksville in Somerset County, PA, the crash site, is about an hour and a half or so's drive east of Pittsburgh (thanks to the PA Turnpike) or northeast of Morgantown or Cheat Lake, probably 2 and a half hours from where I live in the Northern Panhandle. The actual hijacking apparently took place over Ohio, and the heroic attempt of the passengers to stop the hijackers thus occurred over our area. I've mentioned before that Somerset, the county seat of Somerset County is, among other things, where my parents went to get married. Flight 93 is ours. (Very grim pride there.)

There were also many news reports of people originally from our area who worked in the WTC and didn't make it out. (Two were from my high school. Much younger than me, so I didn't know them, but still too damn close to home.) And our local newspaper had articles about a student from our town who happened to be attending a community college in northern NJ and saw the towers burning and collapsing from across the Hudson.

[fuzzygabby.livejournal.com]

I live in Wisconsin, but I grew up in Boston. My dad travels for work occasionally and has been known to fly to CA. So I spent 9/11 trying not to worry about my dad. As it turned out, he wasn't traveling that day. When I was a kid, my grandparents lived in Queens, so I used to go to NYC a lot. And my parents both spent about half of their childhoods in NYC. And I have some cousins there. All of my family was fine. That night, I called a friend in Madison who was from NYC and she was hysterical. Her sister worked in the WTC, but luckily made it out alive.

Re media images, once I saw the footage, the images kept running through my head. Watching it again (and again) made it worse, but, oddly, what actually cured me of the constant mental replay was a montage I saw on French news (yay, educational cable!) a couple of days later, which showed the plane hitting over and over again from all different angles. Seeing it real made it possible for it to get out of my head.

However, about once a year, I have a dream that is clearly 9/11 related. The last was a few months ago, so obviously I'm still not completely over it.

I've wondered if living way the hell over here didn't in some ways make it worse. For months, I couldn't hear about Boston or NYC without thinking about 9/11. It was important for me to visit and see that life had pretty much gone back to normal. Or at least it was normal in Boston. My visit to NYC was very brief, did not include a visit to anywhere near Ground Zero, and was related to the deaths of my grandmother and step-grandmother (both due to natural causes).

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I can say from personal experience that it's not difficult for a solo drive to go, in a single day, from New York to any part of Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and (at least) southern Michigan. That means that most or all of West Virginia is also in that rough radius. I suspect you could get to parts of Tennessee, South Carolina, Indiana, and Kentucky, too. This Google Map (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=new+york+city&ll=40.714167,-74.006389&spn=10.869897,21.137695&om=1) is centered on New York City and extends out to Detroit, which I drove from in a single day last year (with frequent rest stops to stretch my legs) and thus should be a good guide to the limits of "a day's drive).