Many people are comparing today’s attack to Pearl Harbor. Roughly 3,000 servicemen and women were killed or unaccounted for in Pearl Harbor.

While we still have no idea how many died today or will never be found (Slate’s “pancake” article rings this idea home), we know that the WTC towers each held 25,000 workers. Even assuming that a vast majority were able to escape the buildings in the hour and half between the jets impacting them and the buildings’ collapse, we can assume that many thousands of people were killed. Well over 3,000. Maybe well over 10,000. And that’s in addition to the 266 on the hijacked airplanes, the perhaps 800 in the Pentagon, and who knows how many hundreds on the ground.

Think about what the United States did in retrobution for Pearl Harbor. Think about the level of retribution some are going to want to exact after what happened today.

Then think about what Gandhi said:
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”