9/11/07

Today is a hard day.

It weighs on you like an iron composed solely of grief, of tragedy.

Like everyone else, I remember exactly what I was wearing that day. I remember the friends I mourned with — some of whom are no longer with us, their lives also cut short since the Attacks.

Like everyone else, I feel the magnitude of the loss each anniversary. The attacks gave Americans a sense of scale by which we now measure degree of grief and impact; never before had my generation witnessed a national tragedy of such scale. Yet the more I learn about the world, the more I realize the extent of emergency in faced every day elsewhere, and if the scale created while witnessing the 9/11 is true, I feel compelled to do something. Anything.

For example, today I ironically found myself reading about September 11, 2001 in Jeffrey Sach's book, and this is the point that resonated most:

"Almost three thousand people died needlessly and tragically at the World Trade Center on September 11; ten thousand Africans die needlessly and tragically every single day—and have died every single day since September 11—of AIDS, TB, and malaria."

Certainly makes you understand the need for urgent action... Especially since ''the ten thousand daily deaths are preventable.''