The 9-11 of it all

Never fails.

This morning it occurred to me that Sarah Palin was really just a shiny bow and wrappings on the same old package. I really like her, although I couldn't agree with her less about a lot of issues. I could see getting along with her anyway. But people, imagine John McCain's health fails him in October. Do you really believe the Republicans would run her as their presidential nominee for the rest of the month? I can't imagine it.

It was pretty easy for her to take shots at Obama and the Dems in general. After all, she's in the duck blind here. They're the ones out in the open. We know all about the two of them, and we know almost nothing about her. In fact, every time the media, or anyone tries to dig into her life story or deviate from the Republican version, they cry sexism. They make up stories about "Obama-Biden Democrats" making slurs, yet whose names they can't seem to come up with when pressed. Yeah, she's a good hunter. A sniper. For now. As Obama pointed out on 60 Minutes last week, she's complaining about the snooping and nastiness she's getting now about her personal life, and it's only been a week or so. Look what he's been getting for the last year and a half.

Her speech really didn't reveal as much about her as it could have. I didn't hear her speak about a couple of her supposedly strongest beliefs last night, the pro life issue, her belief that the Iraq war is a mission from God, that Bush's foes are going to hell; that creationism should be taught in the schools; but she ws pretty clear that she wasn't going to stand up to international oil conglomerates who want to drill up every inch of our country and sell our oil resources to China or the highest bidder on the open market. I heard her talk about McCain's suffering at the hands of his torturers, but I didn't hear her speak out against torture. Or for the Constitution. Or for checks and balances in government. Or against the imperial presidency.

I heard her belittle Barack Obama's, and by extension, every grassroots organizer's work and yes, responsibilities to the people they serve in poor communities-- and these are Christian organizations he, and others like him, worked and work in. She sold them down the river for the sake of a political point.These are the thousand points of light, the faith based initiatives that the Republicans say are better than governments at serving the needy. Yet she thinks she's superior to those folks who give of themselves for the poorest of us?

I didn't hear her admit that she was all for the bridge to nowhere until it became unfavorable in Congress, then, when it became clear it wouldn't pass, and Stevens was in trouble, she was all against it. But that is in fact the chronology. I didn't hear her admit that she went to Washington herself, lobbying for her own earmarks for Alaska. But she did, and got them by the tens of millions.

On the other hand,I didn't hear her claim 9-11 for the Republican party, and try to make it a political trophy. She alluded to the war, and McCain's experience (although frankly, a fighter pilot is not a general). But I respected that she didn't try to shove the images of our burning cities in our faces, and threaten us with more of the same if we didn't vote for her man.

Oh no. She didn't have to. The RNC did it for her just a little while ago. And the voice-over, smarmily saying, "we all remember where we were on that day."

Fuck you, whoever you are. I was there, on Fifth Avenue, right after dropping my kids off at school, watching helplessly with thousands of my fellow New Yorkers. I was there, frantically trying to find my children in the ensuing chaos. I didn't see Jesse till the next day because they cut off the bridges and public transportation, so he was stuck in the Bronx overnight. My friends were in DC, evacuating federal buildings where they had served America most of their adult lives because no one knew what would be hit next.

And we New Yorkers were there for months afterwards as the photos went up and the body count mounted and the burning and the digging and the praying and the mourning continued. And you don't get to call dibs on what happened to us.

Absolutely horrifying crap.

I was invited to a community meeting in lower Manhattan, for people who had lived and worked in the area before/during September 11th.

It was a smaller group than I expected, and judging from the comments, I could tell that a couple were lawyers, one was a scientist, another was either a doctor or other health-related expert, some were local residents, and some were representatives of perhaps local government, or some businesses, or maybe a union or two.

The trouble started when they hit item 3 on the agenda (formerly item 4 but they were doing me a favor), environmental issues. A sweet looking older lady stood up and told us that the week before, a fifteen foot steel pipe had fallen from the Deutsche Bank building, shot through the 6-inch thick concrete roof of the fire department next door, then crashed through the next floor, made a hard right and embedded itself in the wall. Two firefighters were injured, and the street she lived on was shut down. She couldn't get to her home without an orange hard hat (God help her if her hard hat were blue or white, I suppose).

"Guess what they did to fix the fire house roof," said a lawyer sitting next to me. "They put up a sidewalk shed."

"Yeah," said someone else, "because a piece of plywood is much stronger than six inches of reinforced concrete."

I was surprise that some of the attendees actually started to laugh.

"Can't we do anything about this?" said the lady, a little desperate.

"Right," (the lawyer) "The site's run by the Gambino crime family, what can you do?"

A guy who seemed to represent the workforce spoke up: "But there's a clause in their contract that forbids them to engage in mafia dealings on the premises!" (more laughter, as he showed us the clause that shows the Gambino (Safeway) subsidiary, Gault, is barred from acting like Gambinos.) "LMCCC even has pictures of the site on their Web page, showing the violations, like they're proud of it!" (holds up pictures. More laughter.) [note: the photos he was showing us were off the web site as of the middle of last week.]

"Well, can't we get the board to fire them?" (More laughter)

"The board is full of their friends!"

"Then we should get the governor and mayor to fire the board!" (more laughter)

"They appointed everyone on the board. Look, as (name left out) said last time, if you want to hire a contractor in this city, you're either going to get a firm with an Italian last name, or a big national firm-- like Halliburton!" (rest of audience laughs even harder.)

"well," says the defeated sounding lady, "Would OSHA help us?" (Pandemonium. She shuts up.)

The labor guy says, "I've personally looked at what's now thousands of pages of data on that building, and according to every test that's been done, there are no hazardous materials in the site." (Astonishment. Everyone here knows that there were bones and body parts being found in there on a daily basis, that the roof had been torn apart by the collapse of the trade center, and that all the airborne pollutants (asbestos, silica dust, human dust, smoke, jet fuel and so on) had rained down into the place just like the rest of the area.)

Now it's my turn to get up. I tell them my son's story, briefly, and refer them to the resolution they had just drafted, regarding PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) in the WTC plume, you know, carcinogens. Even if there's no causal relationship, I tell them, if there's an uptrend in responders, there's going to be a similar uptrend in residents, and that means people will need to be educated about the symptoms. A week's delay can mean life or death with APL.

The lawyer stands up and gives a rousing, self-aggrandizing speech urging political action to force the state to do autopsies on everyone who dies in the downtown area, to find out who had undiagnosed leukemia. An aging neighbor with an oxygen line in his nostrils agrees and argues for an ACTUP style response. The lawyer says, "And our slogan should be "Don't bury the evidence!" And the old man says, "bodies are dropping!!"

Jesus. I'm sitting right next to you, assholes.

All I wanted was to encourage community groups to educate the people in their neighborhoods about the symptoms of leukemia, to get tested early and often, to save lives and to make sure that the recorded incidence of leukemias is as accurate as possible, to help us with government funding and education. All I wanted was to protect other families from losing their Jesses. What I got was an ugly picture of what happens when dozens of well meaning folks have been banging their heads against a brick wall for six years. What choice do they have? I don't know that I can do what they're doing.

The very next day, Community Board One passed a vote of confidence in the demolition process at Deutsche Bank. What the hell?

Could Jesse's leukemia have origins in the WTC disaster?

We lived close enough to the site that when the planes hit, I stood on our avenue and watched our national nightmare begin. Jesse was stuck in the Bronx that night, staying with friends from school, but over the months afterward we were all experiencing smoke and dust in the house, on the street, everywhere. The Armory right near us was a base for the responders. My younger son wore a face mask every day until the fires had died down, but I don't think Jesse did, especially after the first few days. I don't know how close he ever went to the site, I don't even know if he ever went down and volunteered. It'd be just like him to do that and never let on to anyone what he'd done to help.

If what Mt. Sinai suspects is true, and more and more people are going to be contracting plasma cell cancers, including APL, then New York and New Jersey need to know the symptoms of leukemia so they can get early treatment. Our doctors in Chicago called it the "good" cancer because there is a cure. The hitch is, if you don't catch it in the first week or so, you die of it. Jesse first noticed possible symptoms of a relapse around January 9th. He didn't go to the hospital until January 16th. Could that week have saved his life? I'll never know, but you can bet that I'm going to find a way to make sure Jesse's story saves someone else's life if that's at all possible.


Third wave of ills from WTC seen
Mount Sinai docs fear new cancers
BY JORDAN LITE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Thursday, May 31st 2007, 4:00 AM

Responders to the 9/11 terror attacks could face a devastating "third wave" of illnesses - blood and lymphatic cancers - related to their exposure to Ground Zero air, says the director of the largest treatment program for those workers.
Though many scientists have cautioned that it's too soon to link cancers to toxins at the site, doctors at Mount Sinai's World Trade Center medical monitoring program are now seeing surprising cases of plasma-cell cancers in people who were there, said Dr. Robin Herbert.
"We know we have a handful of cases of multiple myeloma in very young individuals, and multiple myeloma is a condition that almost always presents later in life, so that's the kind of odd, unusual and troubling finding that we're seeing already," Herbert said in an online audio interview in advance of today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Doctors at Mount Sinai are trying to verify cases of leukemia and lymphoma reported by any of the more than 20,000 responders they've examined, she said.
More than 120 people with those cancers are part of a class-action lawsuit alleging negligence by the city and its contractors at Ground Zero, said lawyer David Worby.
"People are afraid of the C-word, cancer. It's taken hundreds of people getting sick this way for Mount Sinai to say, 'We are more than concerned,'" Worby said. "Washington and Mount Sinai should draw up an entire platform of blood tests and precancer tests."
Herbert was unavailable for an interview, but in the Journal she described three waves of post-9/11 illnesses.
The first was the stubborn, dry "World Trade Center cough" stemming from pulverized cement there and seen in the months just after the disaster.
The second wave involves chronic respiratory diseases that cause lung inflammation and scarring.
Cancers could be the third wave among responders exposed to asbestos, dioxins and other carcinogens at Ground Zero, Herbert said.
Although the "full range" of those toxins will never be known, "you really worry when you have a mix of chemicals about the possibility of [a] synergistic effect," she said.
jlite@nydailynews.com

Photos of your smile

We've been finding pictures here and there, in your stuff. Pictures of your friends, of you, even pictures of us. I feel relieved that you've saved those, as if to say, perhaps, that you still loved us and all this distance was just something you were working through. In all these pictures you're smiling, sometimes a half a grin, sometimes a full throttle beaming face full of happiness. One shot, of you with Lisa, you're looking at me with that happiness. I remember that night, and how close and sweet it felt for all of us-- you were 20. Almost 21. You had survived the first round of leukemia, and we all thought you would live forever. How can all of you be gone?

Right after the World Trade Center went down, we were living near the armory where people had begun posting photos of their lost loved ones: "Have you seen so and so?" and a picture, almost always of someone smiling, often with a group of friends, family-- and it hit me over and over, that each of these photos had been taken by someone who loved that person, whom that person was smiling at-- that the photos weren't just a record of that person's face but of their relationship to the unseen person behind the camera. I cried every day on my way to work as I passed them. Now, I cry on my way to work, talking under my breath to you, to you.