Have we just lived through

the most difficult year in America's history?

For most of us, it would seem

so. Beginning with the unspeakable events that are remembered simply by

a date ­ Sept. 11 ­ the blows kept coming. How much more could

we endure?

The anthrax scare. A collapsing

economy. Corporate greed robbing workers of their future. Children snatched

from their own homes. Threats of a war unauthorized by Congress, the people.

Without for a moment minimizing

the horrors of the past 365 days, I think it is important to find a frame

of reference in which to fit them. We need to try to step out of the present

and set this year next to other moments in the long history of humankind.

This year has not been unique.

An estimated 40 million people

in Europe and Asia died during the bubonic plague beginning in 1348. From

1917 to 1920, nearly 20 million died of influenza, 500,000 in the U.S.

alone.

In 2001, nearly two of every

10 babies born in Angola died before they reached their first birthday.

(Only 3.4 of every 1,000 died in Sweden.) Citizens of most African countries

will not reach 40. (Those of the little nation of Andorra may expect to

live 83 years, six months.)

Sources vary, but it would

appear that 3,062 died in terrorist attacks Sept. 21, 2001. Beginning

July 3, 1863, about 7,000 died in a single engagement on farmland outside

of Gettysburg, Pa. And in November of 1948, a Chinese army evacuation

ship exploded and sank off southern Manchuria with a loss of about 6,000.

At Pearl Harbor ­ an event

remembered simply as a place name ­ 2,403 died.

More than 27,000 children,

in places we do not know by name, die of starvation, malnutrition, or

lack of clean water ­ every day. That figure may be easier to grasp

than 10 million per year.

Six million Jews were exterminated

in Europe. Upwards of 200,000 civilians died in Hiroshima (another event

forever known by place name). Ten thousand have perished because of a

toxic release in Bhopal, India, in 1984.

The thing that all of the grinding

statistics above had in common, it is probably safe to say, is that each

of those unknown millions was known to someone and almost certainly loved

each of those deaths, there was almost certainly at least one broken heart.

Not a single one of them was more or less important than any other.

No more nor less important

than those human beings we have lost in our own personal histories. Grandparents.

Parents. Siblings. Husbands or wives. Our own children.

What will set Sept. 11 apart

when the sorry history of humankind is viewed from the distance of time?

One can only conjecture.

­ The fact that we were

real-time eyewitnesses to these horrors will surely lead the list.

­ Our instant comprehension

of what was happening: Survivors of the millions who died in the 14th

century Black Death could not have possibly known the extent of the devastation

they were suffering. When one out of 10 people in this valley town died,

could their survivors know that the same grief, the same suffering was

haunting the village beyond the mountain, or the market town where the

river forks?

­ Our belief that nothing

remotely like this had ever happened on American soil before. True only

if our view is limited to modern times. Was it less horrendous to the

red-skinned nation to have whole settlements torched, families massacred,

diseases sown in the name of claiming new lands for Christianity?

­ Our naiveté as

Americans: We can't believe anyone could hate us, the most open-handed

do-gooders in history ­ forgetting that we are also the most profligate

users and despoilers of earth's resources.

­ And the fact that those

lost on Sept. 11 were known to us, personally, intensely, by year's end.

Television cameras panned across their faces posted in the streets by

desperate families who didn't want to believe the worst. The media portrayed

for us their lives as firefighters, investors, air travelers, secretaries,

security guards, spouses, fathers, sisters.

­ For me it was the contrast

between the faces in the pictures ­ most caught in a moment of exaltation,

a graduation, a birthday ­ and the grieving, searching expressions

of those facing them.

I remember reading about a

commuter who used to greet the image of a man he had never met as he left

his subway every morning, re-entered it in the evening. On the morning

he emerged and discovered the pictures had been removed, he was plunged

into grief as intense as he had experienced on Sept. 11. The now-familiar

stranger had "died" all over again.

Time. It will be a long, long

time before we have processed Sept. 11, and longer still ­ surely

beyond our lifetimes ­ before that day's events take their rightful

place in history's parade of human atrocities.

And only time will heal us.

[Contact columnist Sallie

Satterthwaite via e-mail [email protected].]