All forms of terrorism, some thoughts on 9/11/2010

• On September 11, 2001, about 3,000 people died in the United States at the World Trade Center in New York City, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and on five hijacked airplanes. This was a horrible, shocking display of the hatred of one group of humans for another. And many thousands of family members of the victims continue to suffer under the memory of what happened.
  
• On September 11, 2001,  about 24,000 children died on our planet, most from preventable causes, with undernutrition contributing to about one-third of these deaths and vaccine-preventable disease causing another 14% of those deaths.
  
• In 2001 there were 6.13 billion persons in the world. The United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, covering the period 1998 - 2000 arrived at an average of 1 person in 1,000 -- or 613,000 -- being raped each year. This would indicate that on September 11, 2001 around 1,700 persons were raped on the planet, most of them women.

I find  research into unfair deaths and egregious injustice and personal crime statistics to be spiritually exhausting, so I need to stop now. Therefore I will not be providing handy little statistics re the number of children and women sold as sex slaves within their own countries or shipped in containers around the globe,  the number of women beaten each day by their husbands, the number of people who did not have clean water to drink, the number of girls denied an education, the number of children and teens forced to make our rugs, sneakers and other commodities, the number of women who are genitally mutilated and/or forced to marry ...

There are all kinds of terrorism. Human beings can be very twisted in their actions towards others, and in their inactions as well. 9/11 was ONE day. Every single day on this planet the above statistics replay themselves, except for the first one covering 9/11. Every day 24,000 children die of preventable causes and every day 1.7 million people are raped.

If you are one of those who get all riled up by what Al-Qaeda did on 9/11, do you get equally fired up about all the other horrible fates imposed by humans upon their fellow man? Upon children? Did you take even one small action this year to help a victim? Give five bucks to a homeless person? Did you help serve even one meal in a shelter for battered women and their children? Did you even give a small scared child a loving smile?