Drawing a “lesson” from a day like September 11 seems almost brutal and yet inevitable. Humans do make comparisons and try to extract morals — if only to help keep going. Let me take a few instances.

Augmenting compassion. The attacks on the U.S. brought to North America the horror felt by many people around the world for a long time, some of them all their lives: that they can be attacked suddenly, dementedly, by others they don’t know and who don’t know them, for nothing they feel they have done.

It seems to me you can go two ways in relation to others who have felt this horror. You can differentiate your case from theirs, saying yours is worse, or completely unjustified and so forth. Or you can use the experience to extend your understanding and compassion to others in at least somewhat comparable situations.

The shining example of a compassionate response, in my view, came from an American couple who lost a son in the World Trade Center and were asked if they favoured mass bombing in retaliation. They said they did not, because “we don’t want anyone else to go through this.” It’s so simple. What’s surprising, in a way, is that this was not the dominant reaction in the U.S. One felt like saying, Come on people, grasp this point.

The math of death. Almost immediately, there were comparisons, often from the left, of numbers killed September 11 with cases of “state terror,” like the half a million Iraqi kids who have died due to U.S.-led sanctions or slaughters of “Communists” in Indonesia after a 1965 coup.

I suppose these were meant to add a larger perspective and so augment compassion in the U.S. Yet they often seemed, instead, to relativize and minimize what happened there. A Canadian academic added an ugly note by saying the dead in New York were mainly white and middle class, which is probably false as well as repellent.

The Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno, writing about reports of four civilian deaths in the early bombing of Afghanistan, said “that’s still only four confirmed deaths of civilians — compared with nearly 5,000 civilians believed to have died” in the U.S. Implying what: Innocent Afghans must pay for innocent Americans?

For an earlier case of odious math, take U.S. congressman Charlie Wilson, who, in the 1980s, backed huge U.S. aid to help Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden, fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan: “I looked at it this way: We lost 58,000 men in Vietnam. The Russians have lost maybe 25,000 in Afghanistan. I figure they owe us 33,000 dead.” Math, in situations like this, is dicey. The admirable couple I quoted above did not oppose retaliation because deaths in the U.S. had yet to reach a certain level.

How insensitive. Last week, novelist Timothy Findley told a Calgary audience, including oil executives, that there are “other kinds of terrorists in this new reality,” then pointed at the failure to curb greenhouse gases due to corporate greed. An oil spokesman said, “Everyone’s just shocked that he could make such an analogy. … It’s incredibly insensitive to the victims of September 11 and incredibly unfair to the oil and gas industry.” Insensitive how?

Are you supposed to be grim and silent? George Bush keeps telling Americans to get out and shop — maybe he should send the National Guard to the malls with vouchers — and enjoy the baseball playoffs, too. At best, this “shock” is mawkish, at worst, an attempt to stifle criticism. Plus analogies are almost unavoidable. Look who just drew a near parallel between the victims of September 11 and the oil and gas industry.

Sunera Thobani. The talk for which she was pilloried is, in the copy I have, unremarkable for what it says, and remarkable for what it does not. Her comments on the violence of U.S. policy are accurate or arguable, and useful to explain not so much the terrorists as the sympathy for their rage in many parts of the world. She is eloquent on the need to extend compassion: “Do we feel the pain of all the children in Iraq who are dying from the sanctions … on an everyday level? Share it with our families and our communities?”

What I find missing is any real attempt to distinguish the position of the terrorists from those she feels for, like Iraqi or Palestinian families. You can’t just “appropriate” someone else’s pain and rage, declare yourself their representative, and then use them to serve an agenda like Islamic fundamentalism.

Yet I can’t find Sunera Thobani drawing such a distinction. When she talks about the pressure in the U.S. to go to war, she says, “We cannot keep calling this an understandable response. We cannot say yes, we understand that this is how people would respond because of the attacks. We have to stop condoning it and creating a climate of acceptability for this kind of response. We have to call it for what it is: Bloodthirsty vengeance.” It’s well said. But she could have said exactly the same about Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. Word for word.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.