3/11 and 9/11

It's a big anniversary day for awful things that happened in the world - six months since the Tohoku earthquake and ten years since four planes were hijacked and forced to crash into three buildings and a field in Pennsylvania.

Much of my Four Months Later post still holds up, but there some updates. There are still a number of people in shelters, but more of the temporary housing units were completed and the government has moved most of the survivors into them. All of the household safes and other cash and documents that were found during recovery efforts were actually returned to their owners; it's not much but I'm sure those people appreciated it. The CEO of Softbank is still sticking to his word to put some obscene amount of money toward helping those affected, I believe it's something like his own salary for the next forever and then some.

I was surprised to read that mental health care services would be made available to the orphans of the earthquake/tsunami. According to that article there are only 300 child psychologists in all of Japan, which doesn't surprise me. Mental health care is one of those things you don't talk about, and if your kid has problems you ignore them in hopes that they'll go away (I have stories and I've heard stories). The fact that the government earmarked specific money to deal with it is a big deal.

As for 9/11, I think we're finally seeing the forest and not just the trees. I have a lot of jumbled opinions on various aspects of 9/11 that I can't coherently form into a nice paragraph, so I'll just forgo what I have to say and give you some videos. These are three cartoons from StoryCorps, a group dedicated to recording the oral history of everyday people in America. All them are very well done and I wish they had more than 13 available to watch, but the 9/11 ones are touching and important to share on this day. Get your tissues ready.