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GOTT-September 09, 2005

Just An Observation…

Perhaps others have noted this already, but I haven’t heard or read it, so…

Last night I walked past a TV that was showing a major league baseball game when it occurred to me: Hey, after the attacks of 9/11, didn’t they — didn’t we — cancel all the sporting events and other such things — all the fun and games — for quite a while?  As I recall, the nation was just in no mood for such things.

Apparently, Katrina has not had such an effect on the national mood.  I, for one, haven’t even heard the idea of canceling things like baseball games being seriously discussed.

Of course, that leads me to wonder why there’s such a difference in the nation’s reaction.  But, tempting as it is to get into possible explanations, I’m won’t do that here.  So instead let me just quickly explain why this difference in particularly puzzling to me.

I live in Hamden, Connecticut (in the New Haven area), as I did in Sept. of 2001.  So I am and was much closer to New York than to New Orleans and the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.  What’s more, I lived in Manhattan for three years — from the Summer of 1990 to the Summer of 1993.  And I loved living there.  Though my stay there was brief, in a strange way I think of New York as something of a home.

So, more than most in the nation, I should be one who was more disturbed by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 than by the destruction of Katrina.

But it hasn’t worked out that way.  If anything, I’m in less of a mood for fun and games than I was in the aftermath of 9/11.

Posted by Keith DeRose in Current Affairs | Permalink

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Comments

I believe one aspect of the difference in the reactions to 9/11 verses Katrina is that 9/11 shook our sense of safety in an unique way. When 9/11 occurred, it was completely unexpected and caught the entire nation off-guard. Katrina was a foreseeable disaster – if not at a disaster level, we knew there would be a strong impact.

I do, however, agree that a response of cancelling events and similar demonstrations of solidarity could be appropriate in this time, as it was surrounding 9/11/01. For now, I believe we pray and call on God for guidance in our response over the next years to Katrina.

Posted by: waterbrine | September 09, 2005 at 05:54 PM

I thought that what made the attacks of 9/11 so shocking was the scale of the disaster — the level of destruction, and, especially, the number of dead. That’s what was new. It certainly wasn’t the first terrorist attack inside our borders — In fact, it wasn’t the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Watching especially Israel, whatever sense of safety I felt had always been an uneasy one, and what there was of it was shattered by the first attack on the WTC. So in my case at least, my response to 9/11 wasn’t so strong because my sense of safety had just been shattered. But maybe other people’s sense of safety lived longer than mine.

Posted by: Keith DeRose | September 09, 2005 at 06:32 PM

It seems to me that the American cultural mindset is much more attuned to natural disasters than to outside attacks. Hurricane Katrina = Hurricane Camille, Betsy, Andrew, etc. Unavoidable in basic form, we just deal with it and move on.

OTOH, 9/11 = ? The closest thing we could really draw an analogy to is Pearl Harbor (OKC? No, it was a homegrown terrorist act, and damage was relatively minor in comparison. The first WTC bombings didn’t do anything of significance to the buildings, and other attacks were on foreign soil).

The basic point being that we’re somewhat accustomed to hurricanes.

Posted by: Bryan Murley | September 10, 2005 at 08:48 PM

After 9/11, no one wanted to gather in large numbers anywhere because of the intense fear that more attacks were coming. There was a human enemy that could strike anywhere, and many believed would and soon. People talked of symbolic locations as targets and sought to avoide them. I lived near the Mall of America in Minnesota and was scared to go there for a while after 9/11 because it was considered a target. There are barriers at the Mall of America to this day that make it hard for a car bomb to get too close.

The threat of a natural disaster is much different. As terrible as they are, it is hard to think of these as having volition or malicious intent. We are not enemies of hurricanes like we are of Osama Bin Ladin. Hurricanes do not hate Americans while some groups of people do.

Lots of comparison are being made between 9/11 and Katrina, but most of them from either side are for the purpose of making politcal hay. In fact, I defy anyone to show me a piece of news or comment anywhere to the contrary. Right now Republicans and Democrats both make me want to puke.

What is important is helping the people who survived experience the love of Jesus by cooperating together as a people to serve the people with so great a need. We need to create friendships that were previously impossible, or seemingly impossible. We need to show the people devastated by this storm that they are loved.

Posted by: Fajita | September 10, 2005 at 11:17 PM

Thanks to those above for sharing their thoughts. I realize that my reactions must be unusual, and what you relate may help me understand the differences. Whether events strike one as completely new and unprecedented, or rather as a continuation of an old pattern of course depends much on one’s personal perspective.

For me, terrorism first crashed into my consciousness as a 10-year-old, while watching the extensive coverage of the whole ordeal that took place in the 1972 Olympics. Since then, it’s seemed like a pretty steady stream of bad terrorism news that punctuates life at, well, roughly the pace that news about natural disasters does. As with Bryan’s equation — Hurricane Katrina = Hurricane Camille, Betsy, Andrew, etc. — 9/11 was, to my experience, the last in a long line of terrorist attacks. True, most of the others took place in other countries, but Oklahoma City and then the first attack on the WTC pretty well punctured any feeble hope I had that it wouldn’t happen here. So what was new, for me, was just the scale of the suffering caused — and the scale differed in execution, but not in intent: the second attack on the WTC succeeded in accomplishing what the first attackers hoped for. That some people wanted to kill Americans for being Americans, and that they might well succeed on a large scale, seemed pretty clear as I watched the footage of all the people coughing up black soot as they left the WTC after the first attack.

But the difference in scale created a big difference in impact. I wasn’t in the mood for fun & games more than anybody else after 9/11. But it wasn’t because some sense of safety had been newly punctured. It was just great sadness for all the loss and suffering that was caused. And this same sadness hits me again now.

And for me, at least, Katrina really does move into importantly new territory. I’ve heard news of many natural disasters before, of course, including a few hurricanes. But the stories coming out of the Superdome and the N.O. Convention Center are very different from past disasters. And the sense of abandonment that the suffering people expressed, three, four, five days into their ordeal, when still no help was arriving, was new to me — and was quite affecting: they were not only hit by the storm, but we were letting them down. (Nothing like mixing a little bit of guilt into the mix.) If all these things happened on even close to the same scale in earlier disasters, I didn’t hear about it.

Posted by: Keith | September 11, 2005 at 12:27 AM

Interesting you say this… I’ve been bummed that Leno keeps yapping on.

Then again… I usually am.

Posted by: Tony Myles | September 12, 2005 at 04:15 AM

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