This is not the diary I meant to write for today. When I first noticed that this tenth anniversary of 9/11 would occur on a Sunday, a KosAbility day, I reserved the date and intended to write about the hundreds - perhaps thousands - of people who are living with disabilities as a result of that terrible day and its aftermath. It's a topic close to my heart, with uncountable articles and statistics and documentaries and web sites and published interviews available to me as references. I collected over a dozen links in a diary draft weeks ago. And yet ... I kept putting it off. In fact, I felt physically ill every time I merely contemplated the task ahead. With time running out, I examined my feelings, gave myself permission to not write that particular diary - and felt immense relief.
If you count the psychic wounds of a nation traumatized on September 11, 2001, I suppose the number of those disabled in some way reaches into the millions. I want to talk about that today. If you, like me, are burdened with buried feelings - with psychological trauma - let's shed some light on ourselves today.
At the end of this diary I'll provide some of the links I was going to use before I got "stuck". Perhaps someone else can write the diary I couldn't.
KosAbility is a community diary series posted at 5 PM ET every Sunday and Wednesday by volunteer diarists. This is a gathering place for people who are living with disabilities, who love someone with a disability, or who want to know more about the issues surrounding this topic. There are two parts to each diary. First, a volunteer diarist will offer their specific knowledge and insight about a topic they know intimately. Then, readers are invited to comment on what they've read and or ask general questions about disabilities, share something they've learned, tell bad jokes, post photos, or rage about the unfairness of their situation. Our only rule is to be kind; trolls will be spayed or neutered.
The closest I came to the horrid events of that black day ten years ago was being unable to find my brother, who lives in mid-Manhattan. His work as a writer and editor takes him all over the greater New York area and, for all I knew, he could have been at an early meeting at the World Trade Center or somewhere nearby. I was able to reach my sister-in-law at their home, and she was worried about his not answering his cell phone. Eventually cell service stopped working completely in New York, and it wasn't until mid-afternoon that I was able to get a call through to him. Those were hours of intense worry, exacerbated by the events unfolding on my TV.
MEMORIES: Learning that President Bush, whom I had loathed since his governorship of Texas, was in an “undisclosed location” instead of being a visible leader. The silence in the skies over Colorado Springs when all aircraft were grounded. The burst of adrenaline I felt upon hearing jets overhead in the afternoon – until I realized they were military aircraft flying patterns over Cheyenne Mountain, home of NORAD. Peter Jennings saying, before giving the news out of Pennsylvania, “I'm so, so sorry to bring you more bad news.” Not knowing for the longest time if the fourth attack was the last – or just the beginning. The vision of people jumping to their deaths while holding hands seared into my eyeballs and my brain. Watching the Twin Towers fall. Knowing that the world as we knew it was as gone as the towers.
Had it ended there, on September 11, 2001, I think I would have recovered quickly enough. Changed, but recovered. For me, however, 9/11 was just the beginning of the trauma, just the beginning of a decade of terror and deaths and duplicity and bad political choices. Osama bin Laden was an enemy I could understand going after, but … Saddam Hussein? From tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and hundreds of thousands wounded and millions displaced, to tens of thousands of young service members killed, or maimed and brought home to inadequate care and non-existent employment, to the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, to soldiers electrocuted in showers built by greedy, thieving private contractors with ties to Dick Cheney, to an economy destroyed by an administration's turning a blind eye on an out of control banking system while it spent trillions on wars that never showed up in its fiscal budgets …
Had it ended on 9/11, I think I would have recovered. I could have written today about the hundreds of first responders and nearby residents and brave civilians who ran towards danger while the rest of us recoiled, and who continued to plant the seeds of ruined health in the following days and weeks and months.
Had it ended on September 11, 2001.
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For those who want to know more about the continuing impact of 9/11, Wikipedia is an unusually good place to start for references. Two pages -
this one about the health effects arising from the attacks, and
this one about the WTC site - offer the best "jumping off" points I found. Another excellent site for references and information is the
Families Of September 11 resource page.
Finally, DrSteveB's diary from earlier today, I was a 9-11"Second Responder", addresses these lingering issues. I recommend it highly.