[John Bono]

And I can't help notice one side here mentioning sacrificing yourself for many others. OBVIOUSLY anyone here would likely sacrifice themselves if required to save a hundred random lives. But it seems moronic to sacrifice your one self than for another one self--because that doesn't make a difference all things being equal. And most people will consider themselves worth more than most people--it's the only way to survive--not many people could live knowing that they're just another cog in the machine (although I don't mind so much) and thus must force themselves to realize their self-inherent superiority over anyone else, or at least above average. I submit that is impossible to try to compare oneself to anyone else, as you start with this biassed perspective, and you can never know a person as well as you can know yourself, so assessing value is mostly pointless. Although in EXTREME cases, you could make an obvious comparison, it shouldn't work when comparing your worth to another person's.
Anyway, the reason you mourned for you friends, PsiMatt, is because you actually knew them. Why mourn the deaths of a few thousand people you never heard of--they're not part of YOUR society. The only thing that made me sad about 9/11 is that businesses would try to use it as an excuse to fire people a moth early that year in a slumping economy.