​"But terrible things are happening every day," Roth writes in Everyman about everything not 9/11. Accidents and murders. What makes this different (for me, and I imagine for many) is that I can't imagine how anyone is entitled to sacrifice others to that exchange. For an iPhone or some sneakers, sure. I can imagine that. You're getting something, and besides they should have given it up. The victim is in part to blame for refusing a better exchange: they could have given up their money instead of their life. But here the exchange is so infinitely more costly—the bomber doesn't even get an iPhone out of it; the denominator is 0 once the headlines fade—and, added to that, in no way a free exchange, since the victims were given no alternative to death, that it just seems... unfair. Not unfair the way "collateral damage" is unfair (that was Timothy McVeigh's excuse, and I think—being who I am—that he needed that excuse when he thought about what he'd done). Collateral damage isn't the point. It happens and it's terrible. But this was out and out theft, because the bombers wanted the deaths of the innocent. (Again, this is why I think Ward Churchill had to convince himself that those in the WTC were "little Eichmanns," not innocents. But killing little Eichmanns is not the point of terrorism—though maybe it was the point of the 9/11 bombers who might have seen themselves as striking at the powerful, not the innocent.) It's the unfairness of the enormous theft that I am left thinking about. It's the ontological inconsiderateness of the bombers.