I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but here goes.

9/11 is a bigger deal because we witnessed it. We didn't watch 28 million die on TV, we watched the news cover planes flying into buildings. Heck, even 9/11 is skewed - we focus on the WTC tragedy because we have video, we don't have video of the Pentagon being hit so we focus on it less.

Second, this doesn't usually happen in America. Lots of countries have people die in horrible acts everyday, but not in America. News is news because it's unusual. School shootings happen all the time in minority schools but why do we focus on Columbine? Simple - since it was a rich(er) white neighboorhood and therefore rare, we focus on crap like "did the video games do it?".

I've got a thing against flying in planes (which 9/11 didn't help one bit). I'm not afraid to fly - I've done it several times - but I don't like it. Even though I was more likely to be killed on the car trip to work this morning I'm more leery of planes. Part of the reason is that you never see an hour-long Dateline special on a car crash - most of them don't even make the local news. Plane crashes are big stories because they're rare - but someone who watches the news all the time might think just the opposite: that people on planes are just tempting fate.

By that logic, a good chunk of the reason we live in America is because we don't want to live in countries where this happens. In America this is an unusual occurence. In other parts of the world it's a way of life. We don't want to live that way.

Third, remember that this is a website not only from America but from NYC, where it happened. I hail from Texas A&M and we had a large bonfire under construction fall over and kill 12 people. To the rest of the world it was sad but uneventful - to us it was a huge deal. News is relative to location.

Finally, for the record, the death toll of WTC is somewhere near 2,900.

Schnapple

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