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The Council Speaks!

Jimmie | October 5, 2006 | Comments (0)

How about some more Council contests to take your mind from the now-ridiculous Mark Foley feeding frenzy I’m sure you can’t escape any more than I?

Here are the best of the best from the September 15th nominees – a week where many of the posts looked back at a day of death, destruction, and infamy, five years ago:

Among the Council, the post that took top honors was an interesting piece from Matt Barr titled “Your Chance of Dying in a Terrorist Attack”. Matt takes the death statistics bandied about by the more cynical would would rather you not worry so much about terrorists and tend to things they deem more important and turns them on their heads. Let me quote a bit from him, because he makes his point well:

September 11 didn’t make me fear for my life, or the lives of people close to me, any more than the JFK assassination made my parents fear for their lives. (And for extra credit, what’s your chance of being elected President of the United States and then shot to death?) Probably a lot like the last generation’s reaction to Kennedy’s death, it made me feel powerless in the face of a profound, frustrating, awful loss. It was an affront to my country, its people and its principles. It brought us all together in an unprecedented way.

It made thousands of Chicagoans of all different political and ideological stripes gather in Pioneer Plaza and Daley Plaza September 14 to sing God Bless America in unison. I didn’t get the sense we were all afraid for our lives, but I suppose I could just be naive, and to be fair, I didn’t ask around.

There’s a chance, I acknowledge, that the people who compare their chance of dying in the next terror attack to their chance of dying of avian flu have a non-selfish point to make, about perspective and allocation of effort and resources. To the extent they sound maddeningly unserious, that’s my fault for overstating the terror threat. Fine. We’ve already established that they’re smarter than I am.

But maybe on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, we can take some time to mull over whether September 11 might have been important for reasons beyond the threat to our individual lives.

I think most of us know the answer to that question well. A minority among us do not and their glib dismissals ought to be laughed down without mercy.

Also among the quality posts were “Three Strands Not Easily Broken” by Soccer Dad and “9/11 Ambiguities” by Shrink Wrapped. Good stuff and thought-provoking.

The top entry from among the non-Council entries was one that I’m proud to say I nominated. Villanous Cassandra chose to write about a young woman whose working days were spent shoulder to shoulder with death and whose life showed bright promise. This young woman, who was engaged to be married, was murdered along with 3000 other unsuspecting Americans on September 11th. Cassandra’s tribute was touching, beautiful, and, above all, deeply personal.