Echoes of 9/11: Mourning ALL the victims

The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is upon us and the media blitz is as good as the German one back in World War II.

This is not really a bad thing. The victims of that attack were innocents who were brutally massacred by religious fundamentalists in the name of a god.

They used infamous methods to bring down two iconic symbols of New York and America. The victims need to be remembered and mourned. There is no doubt of that fact.

But what has the world, largely uninvolved in the original attacks, exchanged for the 2983 victims who were slain that day?

History is not so simple that we can assign numbers to it. The entire repercussions of that day would require several books, not a small article.

We can, however, put some number on the dead. The estimates are hard to count. Some agencies put the number at millions, which is fantasy mixed with idealism. Many Americans think they 'had it coming', which is delusion mixed a healthy dose of paranoia. Frankly, we do not know and probably will never know the exact numbers.

But we can, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Colbert, go by 'guess-timation'.

It would be fair to say that as a direct result of the 9/11 attacks the world has lost about 500000 or so innocents. That is a vague figure, more honorific than accurate. If everyone thinks I am wrong then I have achieved my goal.

And they WERE ‘innocent’. If any terrorist group (or all of them combined) could muster these many fighters then things would be very different indeed.

These men, women and children were just as innocent as any 9/11 victim.

They all have families who mourn them, lovers whose lives were shattered by their deaths, friends shocked by the news.

Whether they were carelessly shot dead by an American soldier in Kabul or blown to pieces by a suicide bomber in Rawalpindi, they were all devoid of any blame or any connection to the planes that rammed the twin World Trade towers thousands of kilometres away in an unknown land (to them) that they pronounced as 'Umreeka'.

Each and every one of them lived lives, made jokes, flirted, smiled and wondered how their backside looked in the clothes they were wearing.

The quality of their lives does not subtract from the loss that their deaths caused. At least try to remember this. No water falls to poignantly reflect on their deaths. No Presidents look thoughtfully into the sky over their deaths. No AP press photographer takes artistic shots of their grieving parents at a common memorial. They have no memorial.

Only some of them are lucky enough to have marked graves.

Don't get me wrong. This is not some anti-American rant about how the white people don't care about the brown people. Whether they were white or black or brown or beige, the world has always had soldiers and victims. We don't live in any more a civilized age than Genghis Khan's time. We just have better medicines, weapons and iPhones.

This is merely a request on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11.

While those who fell first will always have a special place within our collective memories, let us mourn ALL who fell due to the echoes of that day, wherever, whenever they may have fallen. It is not a hard thing to do.