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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.]
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.]
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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'.