9/11/2001: Never Forget

September 11th 2001 was a terrible day.  

Nearly 3000 innocent people lost their lives in the attacks on the World Trade Centers, Pentagon and Flight 93.

It was a significant day in a lot of ways.

Maybe I'm a callous disgusting human.  Maybe I'm not.  But it wasn't that significant of a day in the number of deaths.

By my best estimate/googling it appears that, on average, about 150,000 people die every day.

An additional 3000 died on September 11th 2001.  How does that look on a graph?

Hardly a blip.

How about if we look at it from a more nation-centric point of view?

It certainly stands out a bit more here.

And that's the point.

The more narrow our focus.  The more people that we EXclude.  The bigger the impact.

Never forget.  One hundred and fifty thousand people a day are dying.  They won't have their names carved into a billion dollar monument in New York City.  Their deaths won't start wars between nations.

But their friends and families will miss and love them just as the friends and families will miss and love the victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and Flight 93.



I know what I am about to type will fall on blind eyes, but I in no way mean to disrespect those who lost on September 11th 2001.  The pain of so suddenly losing a loved one must be almost death in itself.  But, in terms of death, September 11th 2001 was likely just another day.


NOTES:
Used the number generator at Random.org to generate the number of deaths for each day.

For the whole word graph the settings were between 145,000 and 155,000.  Why those specific numbers?  I have no good answer.  They are round numbers and they seemed somewhat reasonable.
For the number of deaths on September 11th 2001, I chose 153,000 (the average number of deaths + 3000).

For the US only graph I figured/googled that the US population is about 300,000,000.  I then googled that 6699 people per day die in the US.  I then set the number generator to choose numbers between 6476 and 6922 (the same rate as in the world graph).  For September 11th 2001 I chose 6699+3000.