Eight Years and Still Suffering

It’s been eight years today since the coor­di­nat­ed attack on New York and Wash­ing­ton D.C. in which almost 3,000 peo­ple per­ished. Most of us have gone on with our lives; I know that feels like a life­time ago when I recall where I was and what I was doing. How­ev­er, for many of the first respon­ders and res­i­dents in low­er Man­hat­tan, life has­n’t gone on. I watched the doc­u­men­tary Dust to Dust: The Health Effects of 9/11 ear­li­er today after think­ing about these peo­ple. I sup­pose I had the impres­sion that ill health effects from the recov­ery and clean-up efforts were lim­it­ed to a few indi­vid­u­als. If this doc­u­men­tary is even half true1 (and it does seem legit based on some addi­tion­al read­ing I did today), the effects were far worse than I imagined.

Dust-to-Dust-title

It is trag­ic how the peo­ple that the nation — and indeed the world — lined up to thank as heroes have been treat­ed since. The doc­u­men­tary lays the blame at the EPA and the Bush admin­is­tra­tion for mis­han­dling the health issues and rush­ing back to a sense of nor­mal­cy (some­thing which was not with­out rea­son; though does­n’t jus­ti­fy the lack of safe­ty pre­cau­tions). Once we learn about the treat­ment of these peo­ple who ran toward dan­ger and worked tire­less­ly to help, we all get to shoul­der some of that blame, too. We can­not allow peo­ple who serve the pub­lic to be treat­ed as throw-away tools. It is entire­ly dis­re­spect­ful to their sac­ri­fice and it ensures that no one will step up to fill these roles for future gen­er­a­tions. I’ve not found any­thing that sug­gest these indi­vid­u­als are ask­ing for hand­outs. They want to be treat­ed with the respect deserved them, those respon­si­ble for plac­ing them in unsafe con­di­tions to be held respon­si­ble, and to get the care they need. That’s real­ly not ask­ing for much, in my opinion.

So, if you can find an hour to spare, I high­ly rec­om­mend watch­ing this doc­u­men­tary. This isn’t some left- or right-wing polit­i­cal agen­da film. It is a inti­mate look at how mod­ern Amer­i­ca, in her rush to get back to our nor­mal way of liv­ing, has indeed for­got­ten about some of those we swore we nev­er would forget.

Inci­den­tal­ly, he doc­u­men­tary is nar­rat­ed by actor Steve Busce­mi. Busce­mi, as it turns out, was a for­mer New York City fire­fight­er and returned to New York on Sept. 12 to help aid in recov­ery efforts for a week. Though no men­tion is made of this in the doc­u­men­tary (nor if Busce­mi him­self suf­fered in ill health effects), he clear­ly is in a posi­tion to help speak out about such an issue.

  1. It is sad in light of such a tragedy that I feel the need to have to include this but I want to be clear that I am not some con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist nor am I look­ing for some­thing to com­plain about the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. This just strikes me as a very real and ongo­ing prob­lem asso­ci­at­ed with the Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 ter­ror­ist attacks. []

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

1 comment

  1. Hey, did you see the episode on TruTv where Jesse Ven­tu­ra inves­ti­gates the 9–11 conspiracy?

    Well, I am no kook either, but some things are hard to explain about the whole incident. 

    One thing is for cer­tain: the dust has killed peo­ple. Whether or not that is because there were trace ele­ments of explo­sives, we’ll nev­er know…

    I think it’s great you blogged about this. More peo­ple need to wake up. 

    BTW, i found your blog on google (yes I googled my own name!) and I was won­der­ing if you could add me to your list of Jason Cole­man’s? you can email me at jason.coleman@digitalboardwalk.net and maybe I can tell you more about what I do on the web?
    thanks!
    Jason Lee Coleman

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