Barbara Kingsolver, reflecting on 9/11:
It’s probably only human to admit that a stranger’s death is more shattering when we can imagine it as our own. We all began to say, that week, “This is the worst thing that has ever happened.” To us, I know we should have added, for worse disasters have happened—if “worse” can be measured solely by the number of dead—in practically every other country on earth. Two years earlier an earthquake in Turkey had killed three times as many people in one day, babies and mothers and businessmen. The November before that, a hurricane had hit Honduras and Nicaragua and killed even more, buried whole villages and erased family lines; even now, people wake up there empty-handed. Some disaster’s are termed “natural” (though it was war that left Nicaragua so vulnerable), and yet their victims are just as innocent as ours on September 11, and equally dead. Which end of the world should we talk about? Only the murderous kind? Sixty years ago, Japanese airplanes bombed U.S. Navy boys who were sleeping on ships in gentle Pacific waters. Three and a half years later, American planes bombed a plaza in Japan where men and women were going to work and schoolchildren were playing, and more humans died at once than anyone had ever thought possible: seventy thousand in a minute. Imagine, now that we can—seventy thousand people dead in one minute. Then twice that many more, slowly, from the inside.
There are no worst days, it seems. Ten years ago, early on a January morning, bombs rained down from the sky and caused great buildings in the city of Baghdad to fall down—hotels, hospitals, palaces, buildings with mothers and soldiers inside—and here in the place I want to love best, I watched people cheer about it. In Baghdad, survivors shook their fists at the sky and used the word evil. We all tend to raise up our compatriots’ lives to a sacred level, thinking our own citizens to be more worthy of grief and less acceptably taken than lives on other soil. When many lives are lost all at once, people come together and speaks words such as heinous and honor and revenge, presuming to make this awful moment stand apart somehow from the ways people die a little each day around the world from sickness or hunger. But broken hearts are not mended in this ceremony because really, every life that ends is utterly its own event—even as in some way every life is the same as all others, a light going out that ached to burn longer. Even if you never had a chance to love the light that’s gone, you miss it. You should; you have to. You bear this world and everything that’s wrong with it by holding life still precious, every time, and starting over.
In my lifetime I have argued against genocide, joined campaigns for disaster aid, sent seeds to places of famine. I have mourned my fellow humans in every way I’ve known how. But never before have their specific deaths so persistently entered my dreams. This time it was us, leaving us trembling, leading my little daughter to ask quietly, “Will it happen to me, Mama?” I understood with the deepest sadness I’ve ever known that this was the wrong question to ask, and it always had been. It has always been happening to us—in Nicaragua, in the Sudan, in Hiroshima, that night in Baghdad—and now we finally know what it feels like. Now we may learn, from the taste of our own blood, that every war is both won and lost, and that loss is a pure, high note of anguish like a mother singing to an empty bed.