One Year Later

by Marko Peric

You know how this is generally a humour site? Well, this article isn't going to be humorous. At all. I expect it's going to be a real downer. If you don't read the whole thing I certainly won't hold it against you.

Sometimes when I write an article for the site, I know what I want to write about, but I have absolutely no idea what I want to say. This is one of those times.

As anyone who hasn't been in a coma for the past 366 days surely knows, today is the anniversary of a very bad day. A day that I'd like to forget, but that's not going to happen. I remember it vividly, as if it was yesterday.

But let's cut the crap and the clichés.In the greater scheme of things, what does this day mean? How have things changed? For me things really haven't changed all that much. I still go to the same places and do the same things. My life hasn't changed, at least not for any reason connected to last September 11. I imagine that everyone living in Manhattan would disagree with me on this.

Bad things happen all the time. Things worse than this, believe it or not. Just yesterday nearly 100 people died in India in a train wreck, and 26 died in France in flooding. These were all innocent people going about their lives and certainly not planning to die yesterday, but these are events that will be forgotten by the media by the end of the week.

The events of a year ago, and the repercussions thereof continue to dominate the CNN and the American media in general, and I can certainly understand why. Nothing like this has happened in the United States before. Things like this, indeed much worse in terms of loss of life, have happened in many places elsewhere. Remember the Union Carbide poisonous gas cloud in Bhopal, India? Granted, that was the better part of two decades ago, but 16,000 people died as a result. There was a ferry sinking in the Philippines in 1987 that took 4000 lives. These all pale in comparison to natural disasters, such as the Tangshan, China earthquake of 1976 for which the death count varies from a low of 240,000 to a high of 750,000. Yes, 750,000, which, and I checked, is approximately the population of South Dakota. And then there's the cyclone that hit the Ganges Delta Island in Bangladesh, which killed roughly one million. This might get me some hate mail, but these numbers make the WTC looks insignificant.

It's far from insignificant, though. It was the worst terrorist attack anywhere, ever. Yet. That has been the sobering reality of the western world for the last 364 days and the foreseeable future. This could happen again. It could happen again and be much, much worse.

Okay, I'm going to bed now. This has got me too depressed to continue. Look forward to something funnier on Friday.