Forgive me for not caring about the plights of seven billion people

I was flipping through old editions of Beijing Review, a top Chinese foreign policy weekly that is published in English, with the intent of showing the world what Chinese analysts, policy makers, and other people of note have to say about the issues facing China and the world around the globe. I was thumbing through the 2001 issues, and as I approached September, I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. With each issue that I read, I became more and more anxious to read the September 20 issue, the first issue published after the attacks on September 11 (the issues are published for the coming week, so the September 13 issue was written prior to the attacks.)

I grew up in the suburbs of New York. Most of the kids that I went to school with had parents that worked in the city, including myself. Many of our parents, including my father, dealt in finance, working for the big banks, hedge funds, trading companies, and other firms that take up much of the real estate of Manhattan's downtown area. Many of my classmates' parents worked in the World Trade Center.

I remember that Tuesday morning very clearly. I was in my fourth grade class, and our teacher told us that we had to sit for a special assembly. Some of our teachers explained what happened-- three airplanes had crashed, two into the World Trade Center towers, and one into the Pentagon. Even as fourth graders, we were stunned. One child, Cory, asked if this was “something they tell the fourth graders every year.” Cory's dad worked on an upper floor of the World Trade Center. He survived, but the terror that Cory and his mother must have faced in the hours before they knew that (cell phone service around the tri-state area was knocked out that day, and the evacuations that kept people from their work phones left many of us in the dark as to whether or not our loved ones were still alive.)

That day was not as traumatizing for me as it was for others around me. By 11pm, my own father, who was on the train into the city when the first plane hit, had managed to find a way home on a day when the normal parts of life, like cell phones, subways, and commuter trains had vanished, managed to find a way home. Nobody that I was close to was dead. One of my close friend's fathers was dealt a major laceration on his shoulder, but he recovered over the following weeks.

Still, the mention of the words “September 11” still conjure up vivid memories and emotions for me and for hundreds of millions of Americans around me. A vast majority of Americans can still recall what they were doing that day and how they were impacted by the day's events. Friends of mine who live in the city can recall watching the towers fall out of their windows. A friend who grew up on the lower west side remembers the choking dust clouds that encompassed the area. Some of these friends-- none of whom lost any family that day-- still choke up with tears when asked to recall their memories of that day. To many Americans, and especially those of us who had skin in the game that day, September 11 may have been the single most important day of our lives. There is not one person around you whose world view has not been shaped by everything that occurred that day. Twelve years on, as the anniversary of September 11 becomes less and less important in time, with President Bush, Mayor Giuliani, and Governor Pataki out of office, with the new World Trade Center soaring above New York and with Osama Bin Laden's dead body decomposing in the Indian Ocean, September 11 2001 remains the unequivocal single most important date in the new millennium.

It was with all of this in mind that I opened up the September 20, 2001 issue of the Beijing Review expecting to find an issue completely devoted to the attacks. Almost all other foreign policy publications worldwide had dropped their normal coverage to devote nearly their entire issues to the attacks. The September 15, 2001 issue of The Economist , which usually devoted about 10-15% of its space to issues facing the United States, turned nearly the entire magazine into a series of reports about September 11, and it was not nearly alone.

Opening up Beijing Review though, I saw that the attacks of September 11 warranted no more than three pages of writing, and did not even manage to make it as the cover story.

I was shocked. Enraged. Confused. I felt almost violated. It was as if the Beijing Review had slapped me across the face. It just made no sense to me how a major foreign policy journal, especially one written in English, could continue on with their normal publishing format, as if the attacks of September 11 were just a normal part of life. Didn't they understand that this was the biggest event of the 21^st century? Didn't they understand that this changed everything? Did it matter to them that the collective conscious of 300 million Americans was traumatized by the sight of our towers collapsing?

It turns out that they did. They were able to articulate all of these concerns. They wrote about a nation being shocked out of its peaceful slumber. They wrote about the geopolitical changes that would undoubtedly occur as a response to these attacks. They wrote about all of this. They just didn't care as much. The story wasn't front and center. It didn't consume their lives in the way it consumed ours.

The scope of this class is to define what it means to be a human being, but one thing that we can touch more on is what it means to belong to a human community. There are seven billion people on this planet, and we can't expect the issues that concern some of us to concern all of us. If I was emotionally traumatized every time I heard a story about a rape, murder, war crimes, natural disasters, or any of the other acts of violence or other types of chaos and destruction, I would be in a psych ward by now. It is impossible to feel empathy for everyone. We must be concerned for our own lives, and cannot allow the issues that other people face to dictate our own emotional well being. The fact is that some degree of selfishness is good for us.

While I fully expect the Beijing Review to focus on issues that relate more to Chinese concerns, the fact of the matter is that the publishers, writers, editors, and sponsors of that publication belong to a global community. Their own response to the attacks on September 11 raise important questions.

How much can we really be expected to respond to the trauma that afflicts the lives of people around the globe? Why do we expect an event like September 11 to resonate in hearts and minds around the world, while we forget that areas like the Congo, North Korea, Chechnya, and the horn of Africa face daily violence that surpasses September 11 in the scale of how much it affects their populations. The tsunami that hit southeast Asia in 2004 killed over 200,000 people and displaced millions more, yet I do not spend my days thinking of all of the ways in which it changed my life.

How much can I really call myself an enlightened member of the human community when September 11 stands out to me in a way that these horrors do not even come close to? How can I chastise a Chinese publication for not putting emphasis on September 11 when I can say with certainty that I would not put similar emphasis on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 and left millions homeless. The wars in the Congo that have killed millions of people over the last two decades simply do not resonate in my mind as I go about my day, unless I make a special effort to think about that part of the world.

While some selectivity is undoubtedly a good thing, we must remember that we are members of a global community. The billions of people who we ignore have a right to ignore us as well. When I think about my own shock at seeing a Chinese journal's lack of coverage of September 11 I must ask myself, how many events that are equal to or greater than September 11 in the minds of those who experience it am I missing out on?

I pose a series of questions to anyone who managed to read this far: What does it mean to you to be part of a global community? Does a global community even really exist? Which is more important to you, the seven billion total humans, or the much smaller number of people that exist in your country, state, city, town, school, or home?