I was a sophomore in high school when I woke up and came down the stairs for breakfast and my dad had his eyes locked on our tiny television in the kitchen and said, "We're at war."
I looked at the TV and saw the smoke billowing from the towers. By the time I got to the bus stop, I knew that the Pentagon had been hit.
I told the people at the bus stop. They all laughed at me thinking that I was making it up.
This shouldn't be a political day; but, it's 6:30am my time and people are already making it just that.
So, there were a ton of geopolitical politics surrounding Pearl Harbor. That was an attack on an American military base that wasn't located in a state which launched us into WWII. Many many more Americans, and people from all other nations involved, died than the people who died at Pearl Harbor.
The attacks on 9/11 were far more complicated. They happened on American soil. They were directly focused on killing civilians. They were orchestrated not by a state, by a terrorist group with sympathizers along the territory.
When people try to say that the nearly 3,000 lives lost on 9/11 are paltry to the numbers lost in response, I recoil in disgust for a moment.
Unless you're an aggressive idiot like Noam Chomsky, intent matters.
The terrorist network that targeted and intentionally killed nearly 3,000 civilians, not military personnel, civilians, knew exactly what they were doing and carried it out. They celebrated it. Bin Laden said that he wished that he could only have killed more of us.
We responded.
Was our response absurd in almost every way? Yes. Did far more people die than needed to? Yes. Is collateral damage a real problem? Yes. Did Obama accidentally bomb a wedding? Yes. Have I been opposed to just about all military action in the region for more than a decade? Yes.
The difference is intent. Morons jump on the "Bush lied. People died." bandwagon. Really, he probably just made a bad decision, driven by bias, on less than perfect information. Similarly, Obama didn't intentionally kill any of the thousands of combatants that he did via drone strikes.
Am I defending any of this? Not for a mother fucking second. If you emerge to that level of power, you have to be able to deal with situations like 9/11 better than we have.
Still, don't start counting bodies as if we're all equal. The person who deliberately kills an innocent human being is different from the person who accidently shoots an innocent human being who gets in the way of a mass murderer; again, unless you're an idiot like Noam Chomsky.
The 9/11 terrorists deliberately killed innocent people. They were the catalyst. They were the ultimate cause. The stupidity of the United States' government was the proximate cause.