Guest post. - 9-11 no joke...

This is a guest post from my sister in law. I'm headed to Vegas today! - ND

It's funny what will pop into your head while you're driving. Last week, while waiting for some fellow drivers to figure out the conundrum of what do to at a four way stop when more than one car is there (hint: the answer isn't "everyone wait, then everyone go"), this popped into my head:

"Did you know that Christie McAuliffe had blue eyes? Yep, one blew this way and one blew that way."

Oh my! Classic and classy in one breath!

And that triggered the starving Ethiopian jokes. I cringed at recalling that at one point in my life knowing what you call an Ethiopian with a stubbed toe was funny to me. Why did we tell these jokes? It wasn't because they were funny. It's a 3 wood; see? not funny. Why did we poke fun at other people's tragedies?

And then - as I smoothly yielded to the car on the right and was nearly hit by the moron on my left - it occured to me: where are the 9/11 jokes? It's been six years, and I haven't heard a single one.

A quick Google search of "9/11 jokes" turned up a bunch of pages. I guess you could assume I live under a rock if I haven't heard any of these. But I suspect it's that these haven't been told and retold like we did as kids at school. That's remarkable when you consider how easy it is to forward dubious and tasteless things by email. Does this mean that we, as a society, are "growing up"? Maybe, in an age of terrorism, we can't take quite so much pleasure at other's tragedies because they could very easily have been our own. We had a college friend who was on a NY subway heading for a Trade Center station, but they were shut down before it arrived there. A cousin was in the Pentagon when it was hit.

These jokes would probably draw punches, not laughs, if you said, "Did you know that (insert name of friend/relative) had blue eyes?" It didn't stop us from inflicting that pain on the McAuliffe family 20 years ago, so why is it stopping us now?

I would sure like to believe that we are more empathetic of the people around us. That may not be the case, but it's the thought I'm going with today. Maybe it's possible that we have become a little more considerate of people's suffering in the last 20 years - even if we can't remember stuff from the driver's permit test.

By the way, did you know that Muhammad Atta had blue eyes?

- ND (The other ND) Guest Poster