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

[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."