re: #730 SanFranciscoZionist

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.

When I saw the second plane hit the WTC on live TV in my Toronto office tower I was traumatized. This takes nothing away from the Manhattanites or the actual physical victims. I don’t understand why you would feel that folks who say they felt traumatized are showing insensitivity or disrespect for New Yorkers. In fact I don’t think New Yorkers would mind a bit if others felt traumatized. Surely 9/11 was an event which can be fairly said to have traumatized America…and Canada too!
So why don’t YOU cut the crap?