As people around the country are observing, today marks the six-month anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Across the nation, people are proclaiming that that fateful day changed their lives forever.

Why?

Certainly, it can't be the mere fact that people are capable of acting in so barbaric a fashion. Such heinous acts are perpetrated on a continual basis on this planet, as anyone who reads or watches the news should be well aware. People in Ireland regularly shoot, bomb, and beat other people simply for believing in the same God in a different way. South Africans shoot, bomb and beat each other for having different amounts of melanin in their epidermis. Palestinians and Israelis regularly shoot, bomb and beat each other over an arid patch of land. Every day, it seems, brings more examples of "man's inhumanity to man".

So what is it about September 11th that is so world-shaking to these people? Is it the number of deaths? Over thirty times as many Iraqis are estimated to have been killed during Operation Desert Storm, but people weren't agonizing over that to the degree that they have done over September 11th, so it probably isn't that.

Is it the fact that it happened to us that causes people to declare that their whole world has changed? A sad thought, if true — for it means that Americans can callously shrug off the deaths of others as meaningless occurrences, caring nothing for terrorist attacks upon other peoples, yet demanding sympathy from the world when the same thing happens on our own soil.

My world did not change on September 11th, for what played out in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania was no different than what has been occurring nonstop in the Middle East, or in South Africa, or in Ireland; only the location changed. I had already believed that humanity, despite its technological accomplishments, is a race of savages: given wholly over to bestial hatred in some parts of the globe, but in others possessing merely a veneer of civility which is quickly thrown off in the name of revenge.