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

[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.