This is going to be unforgivably morbid.
A lawsuit has been filed against the Port Authority by the kin of those who died in the 1993 car bombing of the World Trade Center. Without comment on the lawsuit, which has serious merits, one motivation is dubious. According to the NY Times:
“Among survivors of the first attack, which left six people dead and more than 1,000 injured, there has long been a feeling of neglect, as if their suffering was not valued as highly as that of the people who endured the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001. There was no federally engineered compensation fund, no blue-ribbon panel to apportion blame.”
Well, geez, whose death is as valued as those who perished in the attack on New York four years ago? And what, exactly, is fair about valuing any random death over another? We have in the Gulf Coast devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina a clear example of our weird priorities. Only weeks later, as the death toll reaches 9/11-like proportions, is there anything approaching the outrage that was palpable in this country four years ago. Maybe it’s because we can’t bomb God and Nature in retaliation, or maybe it’s because we’re so numb to daily life that doesn’t directly affect us that we’re only moved by astronomical body counts.
I’m working again – organizing – and without giving too much away, I am brought in daily contact with senior citizens (shucks, I’ve probably given it away). I met a woman the other day who was all too eager to talk about her life’s tragedies with anyone who would listen, particularly any young man who reminded her of her own son, who died years ago at the age of 33. Apparently he got into an argument with a friend of his, which resulted in a karate chop to the neck and a death from internal bleeding a few days later. Totally random and tragic, but who’s left to mourn him except his elderly mom and maybe an old flame, if he’s lucky? The old woman still beamed with pride over her lost son. She talked about the flashy job in finance he had landed a year or two before he died. He worked for some firm on the hundred-and-somethingth floor of the World Trade Center. “He would have died anyway,” she said wistfully.
Of course he would have. Everyone you know someday will die. So why privilege certain deaths over others?
Why do the 9/11 widows get to veto any kind of cultural space downtown that acknowledges the USA’s imperialism? Why is Cindy Sheehan’s voice privileged over those of the moms whose kids didn’t die in Iraq, or over the kids themselves who have yet to be shipped there?
My younger brother was at the World Trade Center on that fateful day in 1993, part of a third grade field trip to the observation deck. And had that been an airplane bomb instead of a car bomb, then I would be devastated by the loss of my kid brother and probably still climbing on the soapbox afforded me. But my brother will still die one day (I promised this would be morbid, Brian), and if I’m still around to see it, I’ll still be devastated. So why the double standard over everyday tragedies?