Five years ago, I woke up to the radio and couldn't understand what the announcer was saying. She was crying. I got up, turned on the tv and spent the next few hours watching that one scene over and over. People called me and I called others. "Are you watching this?" "Yeah". "Can you believe it?". Campus wasn't as busy as it would have been normally, and we spent much of the afternoon at the cafe, talking. My classes went on as normal, and my friends and I met up for a meal at the end of the day. Our favourite place, a Lebanese restaurant on Broadway, was dark when we got there. A sign in the window simply said "closed, due to tragedy".
Last night, I watched the scenes again on tv. The CBC aired two excellent documentaries: "The Secret History of 9/11" and "Toxic Legacy". If I had money, I'd buy air time to play these two pieces over and over on every tv network in America. The first shows the complete and utter failure of every level of government in dealing with the threat of hijacked planes being used as weapons. On the day itself, every single communication system and protocol was either ignored, screwed up or non-functional. The complete breakdown of emergency systems could have served as a tragic, but important, lesson in dealing with disaster. The people of the Southern United States have paid with their lives for how little the government learned the lessons of 9/11 and how the bureaucracy of the States is unprepared to help its own citizens in case of large-scale emergency. And how little it cares.
The second documentary had me choking back sadness and fury at the thought of the ongoing human and environmental cost of 9/11. At least 15,000 of the people that GWB called "America's heroes", the first responders and rescue workers who tried desperately to find survivors in the wreckage of the two towers, are too ill from the toxic dust to work, even five years later. Many have died, slowly choking. Fire fighters, big tough guys accustomed to hauling 100 pounds of gear up 20 stories, gasp for breath as they walk to the doctor's office. Cleaners who were sent in to deal with the dust in apartment and office buildings, equipped only with paper masks, gulp 18 different kinds of pills and use nebulizers to stay alive. Manhattan residents who moved back to their apartments after the EPA stated uncategorically that the air was safe to breathe cope with diminished lung capacity and the possibility of cancer. Conspiracy theorists, wake up! The cover-up isn't in how the attacks were pulled off or who set the events into motion, but in how the EPA and the rest of the establishment have handled questions of air quality, clean-up and compensation (which the insurance companies and the City of New York are still fighting against, by the way) since the disaster.
Last night, I watched the scenes again on tv. The CBC aired two excellent documentaries: "The Secret History of 9/11" and "Toxic Legacy". If I had money, I'd buy air time to play these two pieces over and over on every tv network in America. The first shows the complete and utter failure of every level of government in dealing with the threat of hijacked planes being used as weapons. On the day itself, every single communication system and protocol was either ignored, screwed up or non-functional. The complete breakdown of emergency systems could have served as a tragic, but important, lesson in dealing with disaster. The people of the Southern United States have paid with their lives for how little the government learned the lessons of 9/11 and how the bureaucracy of the States is unprepared to help its own citizens in case of large-scale emergency. And how little it cares.
The second documentary had me choking back sadness and fury at the thought of the ongoing human and environmental cost of 9/11. At least 15,000 of the people that GWB called "America's heroes", the first responders and rescue workers who tried desperately to find survivors in the wreckage of the two towers, are too ill from the toxic dust to work, even five years later. Many have died, slowly choking. Fire fighters, big tough guys accustomed to hauling 100 pounds of gear up 20 stories, gasp for breath as they walk to the doctor's office. Cleaners who were sent in to deal with the dust in apartment and office buildings, equipped only with paper masks, gulp 18 different kinds of pills and use nebulizers to stay alive. Manhattan residents who moved back to their apartments after the EPA stated uncategorically that the air was safe to breathe cope with diminished lung capacity and the possibility of cancer. Conspiracy theorists, wake up! The cover-up isn't in how the attacks were pulled off or who set the events into motion, but in how the EPA and the rest of the establishment have handled questions of air quality, clean-up and compensation (which the insurance companies and the City of New York are still fighting against, by the way) since the disaster.
posted by grad student hack at 8:18 AM
1 Comments:
I was in and out of the living room while the two docs were on. I agree: being embroiled in quasi-abstract speculations on shadowy government conspiracies seems like an escape from problems that are tangible.
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