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Well this thread is mildly amusing.
I dedicate this post to the other 150,000 or so people who died on September 11, 2001. Now, if I thought that life began at conception, then I might need to raise that figure as high as 2,500,000, but I don't, so all those dead fetuses and embryos can go fuck themselves. Well, at least insofar as a mass of undifferentiated cells can fuck itself, as the case may be. To the extent that they can't fuck themselves, they can go to hell--metaphorically speaking, of course, since hell doesn't exist and, even if it did, they still couldn't go there because they already would be there, having arrived roughly ten years ago. Give or take a few days.
But I digress. The "Other 150,000" were a low-profile bunch. Their deaths were neither entertaining nor moving enough to warrant much mainstream attention. While their counterparts' deaths generated untold fortunes worth of economic activity, creating a massive windfall for those prudent enough to take advantage of those opportunities. Objectively speaking, it's an inescapable fact that the deaths of the Other 150K were worth less than those of their counterparts. If they wanted people other than their friends and family to give a shit about their deaths, then they should have gotten themselves killed more dramatically. I seem to recall that flying aircraft into large structures was a popular fad around that time; something like that probably would have sufficed. Fame and fortune were there for the taking, but the Other 150K chose to die in obscurity instead.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm grateful for that. The news coverage alone would have been a disaster. Based on my rough calculations, if all the Other 150K's deaths received, on average, as much related news coverage as their counterparts' deaths, then they would have consumed more than 99% of all news coverage in the past decade. They might have been able to squeeze in a short story about "Some Black Guy elected U.S. president." Maybe. Furthermore, if each of their deaths had facilitated the same amount of armed conflict as their counterparts', then it could have resulted in a death toll exceeding 30,000,000. Oh, and if fetal and embryonic deaths created the same amount of war and mayhem, we'd be looking at a death toll over half a billion--well, maybe less. At some point we might start running out of people to die.
So, the way I see it, we owe a lot to the Other 150K. By expiring without fanfare, they not only saved millions of hypothetical lives, but, among other things, they also made it possible for both my television and window to remain intact. I can't offer much in return. Any grief I might be capable of divided 150,000 ways does not amount to anything of significance. The best I can give them is equality. I can't give a shit about their deaths, but I can refrain from giving a shit about the equally insignificant ends to a few equally insignificant lives which happened to occur on the same calendar day as theirs. And that is the most heartfelt 9/11 tribute I can offer.
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