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

[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.