On the evening of Christmas Day, as a get-together Benson had planned at home was winding down, I did a little web-browsing. I saw a report about how the largest earthquake in 40 years had struck, and the resulting tsunamis had killed a couple thousand people. I nonchalantly reported this information to Benson and his friends.

Since then, seemingly every time I check in on cnn.com or nytimes.com, the number killed rises. Right now, it's up to about 57,000--not including those who are in peril from disease, hunger, etc.

As I saw these reports, I couldn't help but compare my feelings to those of September 11th. When my Mom woke me up on that day to tell me what happened, and I saw the tapes of the building collapsing, I started crying and, like most Americans (if not most people), felt dumb-founded for a while afterward.

With all of this death and destruction of the tsunamis, though, I felt nowhere near the same level of emotions. I felt bad for the people who have died and their families, but to about the same extent that I would have felt if any stranger died. The magnitude of this disaster, the fact that whole communities are gone, the suddenness of the death, the terrible fear people must have felt--none of this brought me close to the September 11th feelings.

I've been asking myself why. Was it because 9/11 was murder, and this was a natural disaster? Because 9/11 happened in America, not around the world? Unconscious racism? For a while, I favored the first option--because the latter ones made me feel too uncomfortable about what it would mean about myself.

But just now, I think I realized what a large part of it is. With September 11th, I immediately saw the video images shortly after everything happened. Seeing the buildings fall to this day makes me emotional. Seeing the people running away, the stories of people desperately looking for their family (and wondering myself if some friends were okay) brought the tragedy down to an individual level.

With these tsunamis, I've not seen any video footage. I've had all of my news from the web--and by this point I have stopped reading any articles. The first articles I read (which were really the only ones I read until tonight) mentioned the general fact that tsunamis killed a lot of people, but did not provide any details or individual stories.

Tonight, I finally read some articles detailing the individual experiences of people. Reading these excerpts, like this one from Alan Sipress' In Indonesia, a boulevard of destruction, finally started to bring it into focus for me:

Haggard with unkempt, jet-black hair, Emi, who like many Indonesians uses one name, recounted how she and her family had dashed from their home in fright Sunday morning when the earthquake rocked the province, followed quickly by the onslaught of the dark sea.

As the water poured across Panglima Polim Street, many tried to outrun it. But the wall of water came too fast.

"Then, people started yelling, 'The water is coming! The water is coming!' " Emi said. "I asked everyone to get into the car."

Her husband, son and two grandchildren clambered into the family's jeep. Emi caught a ride from someone on a motorcycle. The beachfront was more than a mile away, but it took the ocean no time to flatten buildings for blocks in every direction and whisk vehicles off the pavement. Wooden fishing boats up to 75 feet long were heaved ashore, setting down atop houses and against storefronts. Emi's two grandchildren, she said, were drowned instantly.

"The water kept rolling us, rolling us," Emi continued, tugging anxiously on her brown-and-white sarong. "I ended up on a rooftop hanging on. My husband ended up in a tree."

From the branches, he clung desperately to the hand of their son. But the boy slipped away, dropping into the churning waters, vanishing. "So I keep searching and searching," she said. "How can I know the reasons for it? It is the power of God."

As she retold the story, the neighborhood was eerily still. In front of Emi was a broad lake where her block once stood, with islands of blasted brick walls and household furniture.

After reading this, and others like it, I'm finally starting to feel a level of emotion that is perhaps more appropriate for this kind of tragedy of humanity.

It is hard to comprehend what it means for something to have killed 57,000 people. When does something become tragic? Is it more tragic for 57,000 people to die than 20,000? What about 3,000?

Tragedy comes from the individual stories, like that of Emi. It is perhaps a human failing, but the real sense of tragedy for me comes from me being able to imagine myself in the same situation--or at least to picture the enormous heart-wrenching agony that she went through during that time. Once the event is personalized on that level, the thought that such a tragedy is multiplied many thousands of times finally becomes overwhelming.

This realization has taken away some of my anger at the attention some news sites paid to how many Americans died in the tragedy or, as CNN has, Tsunamis shatter celebrity holidays. These stories seemed in such poor taste--are they implying that an American life or a celebrity life is somehow more meaningful than the other lives lost? But any personalization of the tragedy helps those of us not directly affected by it to understand the loss.