On this day of remembrance

It's often easy to pull the cameras back and look at the big picture. And there is nothing wrong with that.  But doing so can, at times, blur the fact that for so many thousands, it wasn't some massive geopolitical event that would kill so many and speed up the decline of the West.  It was really the victims, in the last moments of their lives, in their own lives and those of their families, as is the case with how we go through this vale of tears.  I thought of that when I saw this posted: 

Joseph Stalin, that wily mass murdering dictator, was known for his callous wit.  One paraphrase attributed to him is that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic.  I know the crushing weigh of what we saw that day, and the deep in the gut feeling that America would not come out of it the way we did Pearl Harbor, tended to obscure the details and the individuals.  

We might have looked with horror at those jumping out of windows, or debated whether anyone said Let's Roll! or not.  I still remember as I was driving home to get to the church I was pastoring at the time and the gut crunch that came with hearing the news that the first tower had collapsed.  But on the whole, there was so much, so many dead, it was almost impossible to get our hearts and minds around it on a personal level.  Not like a mass shooting that claims twelve, or even a plane crash that claims two hundred.  

But this post and picture is a reminder.  As it is any time we think on the tragedies of human history.  It's all too easy to read 'fifteen thousand were killed' or 'only four hundred died', but that's a single tragedy in a single life and family merely repeated thousands of times.  Almost three thousand may have died on 9/11, and no doubt the families of the victims share a bond similar to other who experience such horrors of history.  But in the end, it was the individuals that day, and their individual families, that were impacted first, and worst.  As happens every day in the world that such terrible tragedies occur, whether to a single person or to a million.  

FWIW, for the mathematically impaired, she would now be 26 years old.