re: #686 Spare O’Lake

Surely you don’t mean to minimize the obvious and profound post-9/11 national empathy just to score a debating point?

Spare, cut the crap. Are you really trying to tell me that you think I have just as much claim to experience of 9/11 as someone who had to evacuate the WTC down the stairs in the dark and come out into that collapsing hell?

I don’t. That’s not a debating point, that is simple truth. I don’t, and Sarah Palin doesn’t, and neither of us should use those people’s experience to harp on people’s emotions or try to gain the moral high ground.

It was an enormously frightening, angering, saddening event for the whole country, for much of the world, yes. No one is denying that. But to say that I was ‘traumatized’ by it seems self-pitying and excessive to me, just as it would be to say I was ‘traumatized’ by the Iraq war. I didn’t go. A couple of my friends lost family members. I was sad and angry. Not ‘traumatized’.

Saying that there are different degrees of exposure to a horrific event does not minimize that event, it gives due recognition to those who are more harmed than the rest of us.