If each of us bore all the suffering in the world at once, we'd never get anywhere.
You've inserted yourself in a conversation occurring a tremendous distance from the events, and it's not like the comment was even making light of the situation.
The internet is global you realise that right? People who are on here are experiencing and have experienced these events, don't assume that everyone is based in the US. They may even have had loved ones missing at the point that this conversation was happening.
And it was a conversation about a disaster as it was happening in complete real time, one which resulted in a loss of life, displaced families, and hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars worth of damage. It wasn't a past event which can be trivialised, it was being trivialised as people were being pulled from the rubble of their homes and workplaces.
This particular conversation was occurring between people, some of whom were far away from the events and some of whom were being shaken as they typed.
I probably over-reacted but it's obvious that people living through an event like this are going to be emotional, we had no sleep and people we knew were missing.
I also have prior experience with disasters, I provided technical support to the engineers in the NZ Urban Search and Rescue teams in Christchurch, and saw the devastation first hand as I was setting up remote offices within the red-zone and rescuing computer equipment from buildings that were missing walls. I also saw people working frantically to extract survivors from collapsed buildings as we went by. I lived in the same house and often shared rooms with those engineers that were doing the rescuing work, and I saw the harried expressions on their faces every day.
So I reserve the right to ask people to respect the situation at hand.
