About 9/11

Lower Manhatanite posted this in comments

My wife lost three friends that day as she arrived late to work after having voted and buying my stepdon a sandwich in lieu of quickly tossing one together at home.

Paul Benedetti.

Sharon Balcom.

And Lorenzo Ramsey.

My wife lived in fear of losing her job forever as the collapse of two World Trade as well as claiming so many lives, effectively bankrupted and flat-out ended many businesses, while literally sending her office from some fifty stories up, down to a smoldering mass of metal, concrete, paper, and all the now-sundered flotsam an office accumulates having tumbled earthward so suddenly.

A bridesmaid's dress.

A wedding planning folder.

A needed previous divorce decree.

All those people.

Steel.

PVC.

Fiberglass.

And asbestos.

Rent to bits molecular, hanging in the air next to death. And smoke. Hanging for weeks. South of Park Row, the city dusted by a fine snow of terror.

My wife worried about going back to work. She walked around ankle deep in the remains of millions of square feet of a mini-city brought down suddenly that day. She coughed like an old west "lunger" for a week. And still, worried about whether it was safe to go back down there because of all the sh*t in the air. The sh*t that blasted through crevices and into the shop window of a jeans store on Broadway, death-washing the trendy denims it touched a mealy gray.

That stuff hung in the air for days on end, and my wife worried about what it could do. She works in insurance and deals with lawsuits for asbestos victims and the ilk--so she knows the risks.

But hey...Saint f*cking Rudy and his faux-moderate aide-de-camp Sister Christie of the Hatchet-Face Order said for all to hear "The coast is clear--all is well!"...which really meant "Get back to work b*tches so's we can run the spin about 'pluck' and 'stick-to-it-iveness', and f*ck you if you can't take a lung or two full of God-knows-what that sh*t in the air is."

Yeah, the "combover and the closet-case" lied like Joe Isuzu on the make. All to support the spin of how it wasn't really that bad down there--aside from all the death smells and visible toxic upheaval. And people went back--fearful of appearing to be "not team players", and fearful of breaking pointed employers saying "f*ck it" to those who did not immediately return.

My wife is one of 'em.

First day they re-opened that part of town she was down there at the new temporary digs, smiling through ash-filled streets as she made her way there and back.

People were unsubtly pressured to return. By folks pushing an agenda of posturing.

My wife is part of the health registry they set up for survivors--so their health can be monitored over years to see if exposure to that alleged "nothing" Rudy and Christie said was just fine turns your lungs into Kingsford Briquets and skin into an itchy, red suit you can't take off.

She lives worried about what that early return may have done to her--as do I. As do contless thousands of significant others, friends and relatives of too-quick-back-into-the maw survivors and duty and spin-blinded rescuers who picked through that ugly rubble. We worry about their health--what they breathed in and ingested as they became pawns in a macho game of shadows and death-dust. Said game sh*ttily refereed by you Rudy...and you too, Christie--but played nonethe-Goddamn-less.

Give yourselves a hand, you two. Clap loud and hard. But again. not so hard you set the awful dust on your gloved hands a flitting through the air again. Hate to see you come down with a cough...over something so tragic and avoidable as all that.
LowerManhattanite