Ground Zero

Ours To Remember


POST 1100

9/11

It’s 23 years since that terrible day. I went there a few weeks afterward and saw the devastation and the thick cloud of toxic dust that the clean up workers were breathing. Some agency of the federal government told them it was safe to breath that air. But the rate of cancers that have attacked those people was and is astronomical. We’ll never know if that false claim of safety was due to a lie or ineptitude.

I saw the trucks, loaded to their tops with the rubble and the tiny pieces of what had been normal, breathing people. I saw the purple bunting over the entrance to Hook & Ladder Company 8, the Ghostbusters firehouse, the one nearest Ground Zero. They lost 33 of their company on that cruel day.

I saw the pictures and posters taped to every light pole, every traffic sign, every surface that would hold them. Every one read some version of, “Have you seen  .  .  . ?” Clearly, they were posted by people hoping their loved one had amnesia or got lost or were injured and perhaps someone could call the posted phone number to say where to find their dear one. But by the time I visited, the missing were completely and forever lost.

Candles burned on the sidewalks because  .  .  .  were they intended to be votive candles? Yahrzeit candles? A flame of hope? Something to grasp when there was nothing? Somehow they were connected to the posters those weeks after the attack, this in a vain effort to deal with the loss.

The only sound was from the heavy equipment, the trucks and front end loaders that belched their thick diesel exhaust. No one spoke. The traffic cops didn’t blow whistles and the few cars near the protective fence moved slowly and quietly. Everyone felt the holy.

I walked north on the way to meet a friend for dinner and heard in my mind’s ear Todd Beamer’s last words to his fellow passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93. “Let’s roll.” And they did. They stopped the hijackers from crashing that plane into the Capitol Building by instead crashing it into a field in Shanksville, PA. That selfless act is the stuff of heroes.

The Other Part Of  The Story

Brace yourself, because this is a shocking turn from the story of loss, sadness and honoring. It is, however awful, the truth.

President George W. Bush, the frat boy, have a beer with him president, was warned by our intelligence agencies that an attack was likely imminent. After the attack his national security advisor Condoleeza Rice wondered in an interview how anyone might think it would come in the form of commercial airliners. The way they could have known is if Bush had listened to our experts who told him about that possibility. But he ignored the warnings. Then this got worse – perhaps worse than 9/11 itself.

Bush lied, claiming a connection between secular Saddam Hussein and religious extremist Osama bin Laden and parlayed his elongating nose into a full assault on Iraq, a country that had done us no harm. Later our CIA people tracked bin Laden to a cave at Bora Bora and asked for help to smoke him out. Bush refused the help and instead began a full assault on Afghanistan to root out the Taliban who had hosted bin Laden and his al Qaeda thugs.

The result of all of that was:

Hundreds of thousands killed or wounded

Millions displaced, people who migrated to other countries that don’t want the refugees

Instability throughout the entire region

The complete waste of trillions of dollars

The loss of the longest war in American history

Thousands of new graves at Arlington National Cemetery

Bush’s ineptitude, his dereliction of duty, created the set up for Trump to ignore the Afghan government in Kabul and negotiate instead with the Taliban in order to withdraw American troops. He set a date certain for all troops to be out and watched as the Taliban failed to meet any of their agreed upon duties. Then Trump lost the 2020 election and dumped this steaming, stinking pile of crap in President Biden’s lap.

Biden postponed the withdrawal for several months and then fulfilled our part of the agreement with the Taliban. And he did a horrible job of it, failing the necessary security for the military exit and, possibly worst, failing to evacuate the Afghans who served us as interpreters, guides and more. We had promised to protect them and their families and then left them to be hunted down and killed by the Taliban.

Every bit of that and more lies at the feet of President George W. Bush for his failures and his murderous dishonesty. Yet somehow we’ve allowed him to avoid accountability. He spends his time in luxury, painting terrible portraits and he doesn’t have the patriotism or backbone to speak out against those who would end our democracy.

That’s what happens when we send an incompetent frat boy to the Oval Office. It works pretty much the same when we send an incompetent, fraudulent circus side show barker.

__________________________________________

There is plenty to remember about 9/11. It’s more than that beautiful blue sky that day and the outrageous killing and the heroism of our first responders and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of police and firemen and women from around the country and even from foreign nations who showed up using their vacation time and their own money to help.

We are the survivors – even those who weren’t born yet. We are called upon to remember.

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  • – Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), 2016


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    The Fine Print:

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Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Heroes


9/11 happened. It wasn’t a few paragraphs in a history book or a script for a bombastic political speech. It was exactly what it was, a terrorist attack on our nation twenty-two years ago tomorrow.

I learned long ago that what we see on TV of disasters like floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and fires doesn’t and can’t come close to conveying the reality, the true depth of the destruction and suffering that lands so heavily on people and places. The reality is orders of magnitude worse than can be conveyed on TV. Ten times worse. One hundred times worse. So, six weeks after the 9/11 attack when I was in New York City for business I went to Ground Zero so that I could understand the reality of what had happened.

There was a ten-foot fence around the entire area, but by standing on a perch I could see over the fence into the carnage. I saw the massive cloud of choking dust that was like a smothering blanket over and around the workers. They were breathing it, learning only later that what President George W. Bush’s people called safe, was actually carcinogenic. Then later congresses would cut benefits for the 9/11 workers.

Rescue workers at Ground Zero

There were big front end loaders dumping debris into huge trucks which drove off to dump their loads onto barges which would then convey them across the Hudson River to New Jersey. The people there were doing the grisly job of sorting by hand through the mountains of concrete, glass and rubble looking for anything to identify those who had died. They found jewelry, wallets – and body parts.

The side of one of the remaining buildings was blown out. It had a huge, heavy orange drape hanging down its entire side. It was there to protect the workers below from falling debris. Nobody knew if or when other structures would collapse. This was a terribly dangerous place.

On the streetlight posts and traffic sign posts outside the fence and all around the surrounding area hundreds of people – maybe thousands – had posted signs with pictures of missing people. They bore notes imploring someone – anyone – to call if they saw their lost loved one. Perhaps they hoped their missing were wandering around the city in a state of profound amnesia. The desperation for finding the missing was palpable. There were candles burning on the ground all around as memorials in what was now a sacred place.

Later that evening I was walking through Times Square, where the huge, over-done screens still showed their advertisements. My New York friends told me that those garish screens are required by city ordinance. But this night the Square was very different from its ordinary raucousness. It was quiet.

There were thousands of people on the sidewalks and streets, perhaps still in something of a state of shock over the reality of what had happened six weeks earlier. They were just milling about, going nowhere and throughout the area were first responders. The patches on the arms of their uniform shirts said they were from all across the country and even Canada. They had come to the aid of their brothers and sisters in the city, using their vacation time or even sacrificing their pay to lend themselves to a cause much greater than themselves.

I had flown many missions for AirLifeLine, an organization that pairs people in medical and financial need with private pilots to help the patients get to critical medical treatments. The organization had called me days after the attack asking if I could fly six Chicago firemen to New York. All planes had been grounded then, so I wasn’t able to help. So, the firemen loaded themselves and their gear into a van and drove to New York. That same thing was happening all around the country.

These first responders were being treated like heroes by those in Times Square that October evening, as well they should be. I’m confident not a single one of them would have called themselves a hero, but what they were doing at Ground Zero, day after arduous day, was the stuff of heroism.

Today that word has been cheapened, sometimes used frivolously, even to describe a ball player who hits a winning home run. We toss out the title of hero so freely, but here’s the true meaning.

Our first responders are people who rush into burning buildings to save people. They run toward gunfire to stop killers. They risk their own deaths plucking people out of horrendous floods. They stop speeders on dark highways in the dead of night not knowing if they will survive just asking for a driver license. They risk doing things most of us wouldn’t dream of doing, all this and more to protect us.

That’s the stuff of heroes and heroism.

Toxic dust clouds at Ground Zero

9/11 happened 22 years ago tomorrow and so much has happened since then to distract us from the reality of it. But the courage and dedication of the men and women who showed up and served, many of whom died trying to rescue others, lives on.

The Engine 54/Ladder 4/Battalion 9 Midtown Firehouse is just blocks from Ground Zero and they lost 15 firefighters that day, the most of any firehouse. I assure you that those now serving haven’t forgotten those heroes.

Shanksville, PA

Neither have the families, colleagues and friends of the 23 NYPD police officers, the 37 Port Authority police officers or the 343 NYFD firefighters and paramedics who died that day. Many of these first responders were rushing up the stairs of the towers hoping to save people dozens of stories above them when the buildings collapsed, killing everyone inside and some outside them.

The Pentagon, 9/11/01

So, too, do the families, colleagues and friends of those who died in the crash of American Flight 77 into the Pentagon remember them. It’s the same for those connected to the passengers on United Flight 93 who can still hear the haunting last words of passenger Todd Beamer, “Let’s roll” just before he and fellow passengers rushed the cockpit and made that airplane crash in a field near Shanksville, PA instead of crashing into the Capitol Building.

The survivors remember all of them and so, too, must the rest of us remember. And we must remember the hundreds – maybe thousands – who came from all over North America, as well as the construction workers. They all breathed that toxic air day and night to rescue survivors, then to recover the dead and sort through and clean up the devastation. It took eight months, 24 hours a day.

I went to Ground Zero that late October day to better understand what had happened. It turned out I was really there to stand humbly and pay my respects and to honor those honorable people.

Profound gratitude goes to our first responders who volunteer to do what they do to protect all of us. They are the ones standing a post to protect us every day. They are the true heroes.

Today is a good day to be the light

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


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    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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