Here is an excerpt from a piece Marian Fontana wrote yesterday for Salon.com after learning that Osama bin Laden had been killed by the US military.
Yesterday, the sky was a perfect, crystalline blue. The color blue that everyone remembers from Sept. 11, the day my firefighter husband was killed along with nearly 3,000 others. I remember how the black plumes of smoke looked against that blue sky, and I remember how that blue lingered for days and weeks and months as I attended countless memorials with empty coffins.
In the afternoon, clouds rolled in, the wind picked up, and by the time I got home, I was cold. I poured wine and put out cheese for friends in from out of town to attend a funeral. By 11 p.m., the first text came in: “Bin Laden dead. I’m sorry if it’s crass to text you this but I’m having real emotional reaction to this.”
There were more texts after that — friends sending love, thinking of my son, now 15, and me, wishing us well.
When my son finally went to bed, I reluctantly turned on the television and listened to Obama’s speech. He addressed the 9/11 families and our private grief: “the empty seat at the dinner table, the children who were forced to grow up without their mother or father … nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.” He went on to talk about bin Laden’s death in Pakistan, and I found myself feeling the way I often do when overwhelmed, looking through the camera of my life as if it were someone else’s, hoping to feel something other than numb.
Photo by Tom Martinez
If we can mount an operation like this, why cant we give even minimal proper care to the tens of thousands exposed to the toxic wasteland of lower Manhattan since 9-11?
Think how many lives would be saved by even the most basic regular cancer marker testing for those WELL KNOWN to be among the most seriously exposed?
No one is even doing c-reactive tests….this for people who were told to go back to an area they KNEW was one of the worst toxic contamination sites in US history.