A few days ago, after visiting the World Trade Center site in New York, I wrote an ill-advised blog, which you’ll still find further down the list. I haven’t deleted it because that would be like pretending I never made this mistake. I clearly did, so I won’t hide it.

My mistake, I think, was oversharing. I went to visit a place where a lot of people died. I stood, I looked, I imagined, I prayed, and I cried — not because somebody brought down buildings that stood on American soil, but because three thousand PEOPLE died. They weren’t all Americans, nor does that matter. Every last one of those three thousand people had a family. All had hopes, dreams, ambitions, problems, sorrows, friends, and loved ones. All of those ended … in just a few minutes, they all came to a screeching halt in a hail of twisted metal and flaming jet fuel and clouds of dust and smoke. All of those three thousand stories just stopped in mid-sentence.

I had trouble with that. In fact, I stood there looking like an idiot, leaning on that fence and crying for people I never knew, for people I never would know. I then said a prayer for those same people.

When I got back to my hotel, I sat down and decided to write down what I was feeling, before it all faded and lost its immediacy and before I forgot to do it. I blogged it because that’s what blogs are supposed to be for, I thought … sharing a moment in my life with the rest of the world.

As it turns out, that was a bad idea. Because I failed to mention any of the hundreds of other terrorist incidents, foreign and domestic, that didn’t happen eighteen inches from my big toe at that moment, I think my British friends decided that I wouldn’t care if it had happened in Britain, or France, or Swaziland, or anywhere else where they don’t fly the red, white, and blue. That hurts. When people die needlessly, it upsets me … it doesn’t even have to be terrorism, folks.

Anyone remember a little town called Bhopal? It’s not as well known as Chernobyl, and it didn’t get the press that Harrods or Lockerbie got, but an estimated 3,000 people died there. That was 1984. It hit me hard then, and it’s still fresh in my memory. Those were people too, and just like the people who died in New York two and a half years ago, they never saw it coming. Ever wonder what a person’s life is worth in US dollars? Union Carbide paid about 500 Million, making each of those 3,000 people worth about $167,000.

I’m sorry everyone misunderstood, and I’m sorry if I offended anyone. I am a little over-emotional right now anyway, because this has been one of the saddest and most difficult days of my life … my job sucks, my marriage is in the toilet, I have an agonizing pain in my c-spine, and I am a wreck. I am one more minor disaster away from going and checking myself into the wacketeria, where they’ll issue me a regulation “I Love Myself” jacket of my very own and chuck me into a nice padded cell. Hmmm … that’d be a lot more padded than where I’m sleeping now …

Thank you for your patience and understanding.