Toll of Sept. 11 keeps climbing, year after year
NEW YORK— So many years without you . . . And all the years to come. They’ve borne the unbearable — these loved ones of the 9/11 dead.
Parents growing old who will die long after their children were killed. Adolescents born after a parent was lost. The sons and daughters grown into adults. Grandkids who became cops and firefighters following in the footsteps of the cruelly departed.
At Ground Zero, the names were ready Friday morning, hour after hour in the roll call of the dead, punctuated by solemn moments of silence and the striking of bells that marked the moment 14 years ago that four passenger planes crashed: 8:46, American Airlines Flight 11 hits the north tower of the World Trade Center; 9:03, United Airlines Flight 175 strikes the south tower; 9:37, American Airlines Flight 77 hits the Pentagon; 10:05, United Airlines Flight 93 crash-lands in an empty field.
The ceremonies here, at Memorial Plaza, accompanied by solo bagpipes and drummer, were subdued but deeply stirring, as the 9/11 anniversary shifts gently away from remembrance — in its broader context, for an entire nation — and toward reflection.
For the survivors of loved ones who perished — in those fiery moments, among the first responders who ran into the Twin Towers while everyone else, those lucky enough to escape from floors below the gashes left by hurtling aircraft, were running out — the ritual remains precious. It is a time to speak the names, to utter a few words from the dais for a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, a sibling, a cousin. In a way, that keeps them alive.
Some spoke directly: You would be so pleased with your daughter . . . Your grandson looks so much like you . . . I hope you’re proud of the person I’ve become . . . You have inspired me . . . Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you and miss you . . .
Many carried framed photographs of a person who walked out the door on that beautiful blue Tuesday morning — the sky so bright it was almost like crystal — saying quick goodbyes, unknowing, no sense that they’d never come home again, what lay directly ahead impossible to imagine, so audacious a terrorist attack, a brilliant attack for the nation’s enemies, and it was cheered in pockets: From the rooftops of Ramallah in Palestine to the wilderness tribal territories of Pakistan.
Just as the attack has been massaged, turned on its head, reinvented by apologists and that constituency that has always claimed — from that very day, Sept. 11, 2001— that the U.S. had it coming, that the U.S. foreign policy had incubated the rage behind this assault, that U.S. imperialism had bred Al Qaeda. And now, 14 years on, on university campuses around the country, students can take an English course called “The Literature of 9/11,” featuring the polemics of perspective on mass murder inflicted under the flag of radical Islam. Perhaps that’s the best of America too, that such a course is offered, despite profound loathing for its content.
At Ground Zero on Friday, however, there was no politics — indeed, politicians are no longer included among those reciting the names, only kinfolk — and no agenda, only a plea never to forget and, commonly, expressions of thanks to the military, the cops, the firefighters, the first responders.
There have been major wars since, against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the former re-emerging in the retreat of foreign troops from Afghanistan, the latter mutating into the even worse offshoot of ISIS. It will be, I fear, a forever war, measured in generations, not years.
Victims keep surfacing — beyond the nearly 3,000 who were killed on 9/11, Christians and Jews and Muslims and atheists, Americans and foreigners, babies and the elderly, men and women in uniform. Those who died in the wars, of course. But thousands more who are in the process of dying — 70,000 patients enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, nearly 21,000 of them receiving treatment for conditions, cancers and respiratory diseases, caused by the toxic and hazardous air they breathed into their lungs on that day and the weeks, months, which followed.
The health impacts from 100,000 tons of organic debris, 230,000 gallons of transformer, heating and diesel oils in those collapsed towers, 24,000 gallons of jet fuel that ignited toxic fires have been devastating, according to researchers. And untold more will suffer from the aftereffects in the future because many of the associated illnesses take time to reveal themselves. Monitoring programs created in 2011 by the Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act — named for NYPD Detective James Zadroga, whose death from lung disease was the first officially linked to a 9/11-related illness — have been funded with federal dollars.
But lawmakers initially capped the compensation benefits at $1.556 billion and limited the coverage to five years. It seems fairly certain the program, with bipartisan parts in Congress, will be extended. But a separate $2.78-billion September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, set up to help those who became unable to continue at their jobs because of 9/11 related illness, is also nearing tapout.
It won’t end until they’re all dead, the entire 9/11 generation laid to rest.
And who will remember then? Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.