9-11 SCORECARD

NEW YORK--We've lost a great deal during the past year. For one thing, the September 11 attacks became a pretend president's pretext to eviscerate the First Amendment and other basic rights. Stifling even the slightest whimpers of dissent may end up killing the two-party political system, long crippled and ineffectual, once and for all. Although terrorists had previously massacred Americans on American soil (jihadis in `93, rednecks in `95), 9-11 wiped away our national sense of invulnerability. An illusion of security--the fantasy that bomb-throwing hatemongers would shoot up airports and blow up buildings elsewhere in the world but not within the United States--turned out to be an utterly imaginary privilege of citizenship.

Infinitely more important, we lost a lot of people: 2,819 at the World Trade Center, including passengers on the planes that struck them. 189 in Washington. 44 in Pennsylvania. 3,052 Americans in all, not including many more who will die from cancer, asbestosis and other ailments related to the attacks. Many more are disabled. Huge numbers have suffered emotional damage, losing parents, children, spouses, friends.

And we killed a lot of people, too. We killed so many that nobody's sure of the exact number: 84 accidentally-bombed Afghans who were either neutral or on our side. Four Canadian soldiers. 40 innocent people celebrating a wedding. Several U.S. servicemen died in helicopter mishaps. Estimates range from 3,500 to 10,000 total, and that's not including the Taliban troops we killed on purpose--even though they had nothing to do with 9-11.

The odds that one of those 6,500 to 13,000 people--or their children--would someday have cured cancer or written a great novel may be slim. But those deaths are nevertheless an unfathomable tragedy, and not just to their friends and families. If a universe is lost when a single person dies, who can justify what was done to us, or what we did to others?