9/11 Notwithstanding, We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
No one else on the planet is one one-hundredth as proficient at destroying America as Americans.
by Rich Herschlag
Most rational people I know don’t believe in premonitions. I used to be one of them. The morning of September 11, 2001 I was scheduled to take the bus from Easton, Pennsylvania into lower Manhattan to testify on behalf of a client. The address of the Board of Standards and Appeals was 40 Rector Street, about three blocks from the World Trade Center.
As an expert witness in civil/structural engineering matters, I had become proficient in helping residents fight rich, powerful developers seeking yet another zoning variance to add yet another several stories to already dauntingly tall proposed luxury high-rises. My written testimony for the hearing that day was complete and now it was just a matter of setting my alarm clock and perhaps later squeezing in a little more sleep on the bus between prepping for potential questions.
But I had already decided not to go, which was basically sacrilege. This was my bread and butter, and my client—a group of concerned citizens who had come to depend on me—had always treated me well and had every reason to expect the same in return. However, starting around Saturday for reasons relating to a vaguely defined queasiness, I told my wife something terrible was coming. By Monday evening I knew intuitively not to venture in when morning came. When around two AM I put my head down without setting the alarm clock I was as good as a no-show.
Get The Banter in your inbox. Sign up for free today:
The following morning is one millions of people remember in millions of distinct ways. For me it was getting up late and figuring out what had happened while culling through a dozen panicked voicemails from my wife, who wasn’t sure if I had changed my mind about going in. It was a few minutes after 10 AM, and it was from those voicemails rather than CNN I first learned about the North and South Towers being hit and the South Tower having fallen.
During the next few days of tracking down friends and family, explaining to my little kids what had happened, drowning in cable news, and learning that a high school classmate was missing, I began to feel what came to be known as survivor’s guilt. I had heard the blast during the February 1993 World Trade Center attack from my office window at the Manhattan Borough President’s Office a few blocks away. The following day I was on the ground floor of the North Tower staring down through a multi-level hole into the subterranean parking garage that had been blown apart by a bomb in a van. The difference with 9/11 was the feeling of being safe and far removed from Ground Zero, where I had worked on and off since 1984. It was intolerable.
On September 14, 2001 I put together a small work crew and started offering our services to every New York City, state, and federal agency I thought might need a few extra arms and legs to dig through the rubble. There were no takers. Within a week Ground Zero was locked down even from capable volunteers. And so I resigned myself to being a last responder.
Last responders have rarely if ever been called heroes, but they have done some real good. In my case it meant co-founding a scholarship for my fallen high school classmate, writing a published story about Major Leaguer turned NYC firefighter Frank Tepedino, and perhaps most significantly rededicating myself to designing and renovating countless thousands of residential and commercial square feet as a way of consciously and gradually replacing the ten million-plus square feet vaporized on 9/11.
With the foregoing as a qualifier I am going to lay an uncomfortable truth on the table. For most people 20 years down the road the commemoration of 9/11 has become largely a distraction. To some folks this statement may resonate like beating up Santa on Christmas Day, but I stand by it. Among the exceptions, of course, are the people who actually lost a loved one on 9/11 or from a related disease months or years later. September 11 is their day and rightfully so. But the aggrieved reminiscence of millions of distant onlookers about how that Tuesday two decades ago changed their lives forever is based largely on a fallacy—that a bunch of foreign terrorists ruined our once serene country. At least in terms of taking innocent lives here at home, they can’t hold a candle to us.
Almost three thousand innocent lives lost is an unspeakable tragedy. So it must follow that six thousand innocent lives lost is roughly twice as bad. How do we rate a hundred thousand? A million? We are currently losing a 9/11’s worth of Americans roughly every 36 hours to a pandemic preventable by a prick or two in the arm. This carnage is largely the gift of a rightwing driven social media cult with business addresses in New York and Silicon Valley.
Not every day here in America includes a homegrown mass murder like the one at a country music concert in Las Vegas in 2017 or the one at Stoneman Douglas High School the following year. But literally every day includes numerous smaller all-American mass shootings in stores, malls, homes, and parking lots both rural and urban. Few of these even make it to our Facebook newsfeed, but if you add up the larger ones, the smaller ones and the solo acts, the typical total is 10,000 to 15,000 red white and blue firearm related homicides per year, or more than a quarter million since 9/11.
How about vehicular homicide caused by domestic drivers drinking domestic beer? How about vehicular homicide due to preoccupation with a cell phone? The phone may have been manufactured in China, but the porn was probably made in Southern California.
Speaking of porn, an estimated 15,000 to 50,000 sex slaves are added to the ranks every year in the United States, many of them underage girls born in exotic lands like Chicago, Newark, and Little Rock. While these are people who do not yet qualify as domestic fatalities, this decade’s sex slaves are next decade’s drug overdoses.
Which leads us to opioid induced and related deaths, brought to you by that great American family the Sacklers, their pharmaceutical industry peers, and their countless enablers in Main Street pharmacies, HMOs, and friendly next door off-label pushers. Last year, a banner year for feeling isolated and depressed in the land of the free, patriotic opioid addicts bought American at a record pace and perished to the tune of about thirty 9/11s.
While it can be hard to get a handle on these mindboggling statistics, it is even harder to get a handle on the American gut brought to you by Nestlé, Monsanto, and American Cyanamid. Though preventable obesity related fatalities from heart attack, stroke, diabetes and several other leading diet-driven killers may lack the drama of a building attacked by planes or a post office sprayed with gunfire, these deaths leave approximately the same size holes in families, offices, and bowling leagues as their headline grabbing counterparts.
Throw in tobacco-related deaths from plants harvested below the Mason-Dixon Line and we are looking at multiple homegrown 9/11s every day of the year with no end in sight. There will be no shrine for deceased OxyContin addicts or three-hour HBO retrospective documentaries on people drinking bleach at the behest of a sitting U.S. president. But I submit what should be obvious—that your anti-vax uncle on a ventilator this minute is a more pressing matter than a horrific attack from foreign terrorists back at the turn of the millennium and that no one else on the planet is one one-hundredth as proficient at destroying America as Americans.
Read an excerpt from the latest for Banter Members and get 6 months free today:
Insurrectionists Like Trump Cannot Be Allowed To Escape Justice
Not only is Trump getting away with trying to overthrow democracy, he’s freely planning his next move.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC -- Every time I ride my bike, I pass by quite a few historic locations. Not a shock, of course, considering that I live in the D.C. metroplex where there’s history all over the place. But there’s one particularly fascinating site along my bike route in southern Maryland: the former location of the farmhouse where Lincoln assassination conspirator George Atzerodt hid following the horrible events of April 15, 1865 -- the night when President Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre.
Azterodt was assigned by Booth to murder Vice President Andrew Johnson that night, but never actually made the attempt. Instead, he got hammered at a D.C. bar then fled to Germantown, Maryland, 25 miles away, where he eventually hunkered down in a barn owned by Hartman Richter, his cousin. The ruins of the mill where Atzerodt hid on the night of the assassination, before making it to his cousin’s property nearby, are also located near my bike route. You can still see the ruins of the mill from Clopper Road as you wait at a stoplight a few feet away…
You shouldn't feel guilty about not being there, Rich. Your instincts and premonition was bang on at that time. By not going, you spared your family a whole lot of grief and anxiety!
Is America Great Again yet?