A Few Thousand Other People Worth Remembering

I’ve written a few posts about 9/11 over the years. My wife used to work for Aon, which lost over 170 people on 9/11, and she’d met at least one of them, a nice guy named Jim Berger. And a few years ago, I stumbled across the memoral for U.S. Navy Commander Dan F. Shanower in Naperville. Then last year, I wrote about my discomfort over the 9/11 memorial in Manhattan, and I explained why I had nothing more to say about 9/11.

As it turns out, I have a few more thoughts about 9/11 bouncing around in my brain after all, and this is as good a time as any to ramble on about them.

First of all, remember that the number of Americans who died on 9/11 is much larger than the three thousand people who died in the World Trade Center, in the Pentagon, and on the hijacked airplanes. I don’t have an exact figure, but the true death toll for September 11, 2001, is much closer to ten thousand people.

That’s not some conspiracy theory, it’s mortality statistics. There are about 300 million people in the United States, and a small percentage of them die every day. If 9/11 was otherwise a typical day, it means that in addition to the 3000 deaths from terrorism, another 7000 Americans passed away for other reasons.

I can’t get it out of my head that the families of some of those people have got to feel a bit…cheated, maybe? Imagine, for example, the wife of some liquor store clerk who was shot to death in a robbery on the night of September 10th, 2001. She wakes up the next morning for one of the worst days of her life, only to discover that nobody seems to care.

I don’t want to be all holier-than-thou about this, but just this once, when we think of the people who died on 9/11, let’s try to think of all the people who died on 9/11.

On another matter, I’m bothered by how often we we make the mistake of judging people’s actions by the results, rather than by the expected probability distribution when they acted. Consider a guy who buys a lottery ticket and wins a million bucks. Was he smart to buy that lottery ticket? If you say yes, because he won all that money, you’re part of the problem.

At the time he made the decision and acted by purchasing a ticket, he didn’t know he was going to win. All he knew is that there was a very small chance he would win, and a much larger chance he would lose. A typical state lottery probably only gives away half the money as prizes, which means that, speaking in terms of probability (and simplifying a lot), he could expect to lose half of what he spent on the ticket. Financially speaking, buying that ticket was a bad move. It’s only pure luck that prevented him from paying the price.

I bring this up in connection with 9/11 because the exact same argument applies to the firefighters, police officers, and EMTs who responded to the World Trade Center and died in the collapse. We call them heroes, and indeed they are. But they didn’t know they were going to die when they made the decision to respond to the scene and enter the towers. All they knew was that there was a risk —  a non-zero probability of death — and they went ahead and did it anyway. They are heroes not because they died, but because they risked death.

I think that’s an important distinction because there are plenty of other people — other firefighters and police and EMTs and anyone else who helped — who took the same risk that day, and happened by chance to survive. That they didn’t die does not in any way diminish their heroism. So remember the dead heroes, but also remember the heroes who still walk among us.