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

[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).