Had to share

[thebratqueen]

lucifrix Posted venting her frustrations about New Yorkers who order other people not to assume they understand the pain of 9-11. Thinking she meant my rant against the "enough" movement, I responded to her to clarify that I never meant that non-New Yorkers (PA/DC/flight relatives) couldn't feel pain, just that it wasn't the same thing.

She replied that she didn't mean me (God do I have an ego ;) ) but the folks in this thread, who jumped all over one person for posting about how numb they were yesterday because they don't get it like New Yorkers do, and claiming that they do "minimizes" the pain that NYers feel.

I suggest reading the thread for context, but I wanted to share some of my response just in case there was any doubt about how I feel re: this issue.

Now I could do a reply here about the years that lucifrix lived in Manhattan and how many close friends of hers still live mere blocks from Ground Zero but quite frankly that's not the point. It is absolutely disgusting that anyone would try to appoint themselves as the grief guard and demand that someone else show proof of validation before daring to speak of how the deaths of thousands in PA, DC and the WorldTrade Center affected them.

This was a humanhorror. Yes, those of us with close ties to WTC, or the Pentagon, or the planes, or even NYC in general are obviously going to feel this more keenly than those in Ohio, California, Australia or elsewhere, but that doesn't give us the right to order other people not to feel pain.

Have I twitched when I read overly maudlin essays written by people who've never been to NYC and who clearly don't "get it" the way that locals do? Yeah. But who's to say anything I've written about it has been any more meaningful or well-written just because I had a 212 area code for most of my life?

If your grief over this event is so fragile that someone posting in a - I feel a need to point this out because your ability to avoid talking to non-New Yorkers about this was astonishingly easy - Philadelphia LJ group "minimizes" it, I strongly suggest trying a mirror for the source of your problem.