James Joyner has a thoughtful post on why the recent catastrophe in Sri Lanka isn't eliciting a proportional response compared to, among other things, 9/11:

While proximity is certainly an issue--we're naturally going to be more traumatized by the deaths of our countrymen than those half a world away--there is something else involved. Callers had several answers, the most compelling of which was articulated by Glenn Beck himself, who called in on his cell phone: We react differently to natural phenomena--acts of God, if you will--than to the intentional acts of humans. Beck observed that we react much more viscerally to the Nazi Holocaust than to the 1918 Influenza epidemic.

As a few coworkers of ours discussed Sri Lanka today, the same thought had crossed my mind. After 9/11, even the French were flying the American flag in solidarity. I haven't felt the need to go out immediately and buy a Sri Lankan flag (or even necessarily discover what one looks like). I have been reading about Sri Lanka a bit, but more out of curiosity than a search for kinship.

The points that Joyner and Beck make are pretty on-target and they are the same conclusions, more or less, that I came to. Man vs. Man stories (such as 9/11) are considerably more gripping than Man vs. Nature ones. In the former, not only do we identify somewhat with the victim, but there is also a connection to the perpetrator. By choosing to identify with the victims, and grieve, we simultaneously distance ourselves from the perpetrator. Mourning the victims on 9/11, on some level, differentiates us from those that would celebrate it.

In addition to being reminded of 9/11 for comparison, I'm also reminded of the most gripping national crisis that preceeded it: Columbine. In the greater scheme of things, it's amazing how less than two dozen deaths got so deep into the national psyche. More are probably killed on a daily basis due to street violence. But, as with 9/11, the perpetrators had a face. We couldn't blame god or nature, but only ourselves in a collective sense.

Whenever the gun control debate comes up, conservatives are apt to point out that more people die annually of x than of gun violence, so if we are going to illegalize guns, why not illegalize x. They also say that guns don't kill people: people do. These are both good points and I think that inadvertently they are coherently melded into the argument for gun control (which, in full disclosure I should say that I reject): protecting us from ourselves because we can. Advocates of gun control recognize the second argument and to a degree accept it: it's not the gun they're usually worried about, but the person using it. As people, guns make us more capable of doing more harm. To differentiate themselves from those that use guns, they support curbing their availability.

When it comes to human evil, it's natural to want to position ourselves in any role except a sympathizer to those that are committing the deed. People are prone to latch on to some figure in any story (fictional or real) and so we choose the victims.

The other reason, proximity, could be attributed to a self-defense mechanism as easily as anything else. We don't live in Sri Lanka, nor does anyone we know. A tsunami is very unlikely to invade our shores in our lifetime because the big ones only occur relatively infrequently. It was a freak occurance that happened to someone else. Contrast this with Columbine, which was one of many such instances, and 9/11, which we fear as a harbinger of what is to come, and the difference is night and day. We're much more likely to be concerned with the latter, seek someone to identify with, and choose the victims. In that context, our grief was prioritized towards that which is most likely to affect us in the future.