in someone else's words

[reposted from DiaryLand]

The following excerpt is from a 9/11 post by an acquaintance of mine, Gwyneth (gwynbones), to a mailing list I am subscribed to. It expresses sentiments I agree with, better than what I wrote Wednesday. The full text of the post can be found here.

...But I'm mostly pissed off because some people are acting as though our grief, because we're Americans, is somehow more important than anyone else's. Yeah, it's important to us, of course it is, because we're Americans, but guess what?

Some people deal with this shit all the time.

For some people, public places being blown up are common practice. In some countries, everyone knows at least one or two people killed by a terrosrist action, killed by a gun, killed by a bomb. Some people know far more that are gone.

My God, learn something from that.

This should be telling us, hey, we finally know what those people are going through, and it sucks! This should be telling us, we can understand this better now, we can relate to these people in other countries.

This should be telling us how grateful we should be for the life we lead here. How grateful we should be that most of our relatives and friends are still alive, that we don't have to go through this mind numbing grief all the time, never getting a chance to rest.