Sunday, September 11, 2022
The trouble with viewing 9/11 and the pandemic through a wartime lens
When we use military metaphors to make sense of domestic tragedies, we blind ourselves to the realities of human suffering.
In the 21 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have relied on wartime tropes to understand the tragedy: “Ground Zero” conjured images of nuclear detonation; the dead were described as “fallen heroes”; the proliferation of American flags served as a visual symbol of unity; we conjured up a “war on terror” in response. We used these tropes to create a sense of solidarity, something we’ve also attempted with less impressive results throughout the coronavirus pandemic. In the last two years, calls for unity and common purpose have centered on the same talk of victory and defeat that permeated 9/11 discourse. Vaccines and therapeutics have been figured as weapons, and viral surges described as covid’s “counterattack.” We’ve been at “war” with a cartoon spiky orb, and we’ve been losing.The way we speak about the pandemic comes straight from the conceptual mold of 9/11 — the last crisis we can remember fondly for the way it brought us all together, if only for a while. Such rhetoric was stunningly effective at convincing the vast majority of Americans at the time that military actions were not only justified but a necessary response to the attacks. That focus, however, left us blind to the extent of the internal damage, including the suffering of those such as sick first responders and civilians. While similar martial metaphors have failed to unite us as successfully throughout the pandemic, they may still serve to obscure pain and loss.
Framing major domestic disasters through the lens of war occludes a role for civilians on the front line, displacing them from our national narratives. In fact, thanks in large part to community advocacy, only recently has the 9/11 commemorative story been modified to include those who are suffering from or have died of 9/11-related illnesses like cancer, respiratory and gastrointestinal illness, and other health issues caused by inhaling toxic dust. Such health problems began emerging in the early days of the World Trade Center cleanup, but they broke into public consciousness only after being championed by comedian Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” in 2010, nine years after the attacks.
More broadly, recognition for 9/11’s second wave of victims has come after a decades-long struggle to secure care for those who cleaned up the World Trade Center site, and for those who lived, worked and attended school in Lower Manhattan’s toxic air in the aftermath of the towers’ collapse. All were assured by their own government that the air was safe to breathe. (Despite insufficient data, the Environmental Protection Agency announced within a week of the attacks that the air was safe, a claim that was debunked in 2003 in a report by the EPA inspector general.) All saw their concerns roundly ignored by those in power, even as officials invoked 9/11 to justify expensive interventions abroad.But even though the wartime pomp of 9/11 made it harder to see this domestic tragedy unfolding, that same language has been critical for those seeking recognition. First responders had to lean heavily on their Bush-era depiction as the “first soldiers in the war on terror” when they went to Washington seeking care for their post-9/11 health issues. Others for whom that ready-made frame was a poor fit had to adapt their messaging in an almost comical exercise in creative marketing. The more than 300,000 civilians who breathed in the toxic air of Lower Manhattan after the attacks found that the only way to amplify public awareness of their illnesses was to position themselves as different kind of soldiers — troops in the fight to save the economy (a position that played into Rudy Giuliani’s assertion that “the resilience of life in New York City is the ultimate sign of defiance to terrorists”). But while the fantasy of toughing it out in wartime may have helped these patients achieve recognition, it was also what exposed them to danger in the first place. The media at the time highlighted their “brave” return to schools and homes, fulfilling their patriotic duty of “getting back to normal” as quickly as possible, breathing air they were promised was safe.
Today, a similar scenario is playing out in our covid-ravaged communities, and for similar reasons. As in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, our obsession with “getting back to normal” underpins much of the conversation about the pandemic. This fall we’ll be sending our children back to schools that have no covid mitigations in place and repeating the same careless mistakes we made with students after 9/11, potentially imposing a lifetime of illness in service of our desire to believe that our problems are over — or, more troublingly, that we’ve “vanquished” them.It’s this fiction of triumph that’s critical. Wartime metaphors feel good because they tap into our understanding that wars end. Never mind that war has been our reality for the past two decades, no matter how many times we attempt to bookend it into a set of defeats and victories. Indeed, it may be this implicit idea of a terminus that makes the fact of perpetual conflict bearable. Much the same is true for the pandemic, which lingers in ways we find we can endure precisely because our martial metaphors accustom us to thinking we will definitively defeat it. But until we stop using wartime language to describe domestic crises, we’ll be stuck with an unrealistic notion of the future, unable to imagine it as anything other than a return to some golden version of the past where everything was “normal.” That means we won’t be able to meaningfully move forward, let alone confront the lingering traumas and other consequences of the crisis we’re still living through.
We have an opportunity, however, to think outside the war framing and look critically at which experiences and impacts should inform our covid response. The coronavirus pandemic in the United States is a self-inflicted national tragedy whose uneven effects on people make it hard to classify. The fact that it has occurred in an age of intense political polarization and was exacerbated by the incompetence of the nation’s leaders has only made matters worse. Like the story of 9/11, the story of the pandemic is about the struggles of civilians to be taken seriously in the aftermath of government negligence. They are both stories of the failure of institutions and imagination and, frankly, our failure to recognize them as such is tied to our inability to conceive of these events as chronic rather than acute disasters.
We are not living through a war. We cannot fight our way out of a pandemic. Understood in terms of their domestic ramifications, the coronavirus and 9/11 are both public health stories, not war stories. Responding to them properly requires attention to social systems and health infrastructure, neither of which tends to capture the public imagination like victories and heroes do. When we think about chronic problems through a wartime framework, we make them more tolerable, but at the expense of our capacity to solve them. We must stop speaking as if we were all good soldiers and recognize that some human tragedies are just that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/09/09/covid-911-anniversary-war-metaphors/
Jill Biden shares memories of Sept. 11 as wife, sister, more
When Jill Biden realized that terrorists had attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, her husband, Joe, wasn’t the only loved one whose safety she worried about.
Biden recalled being “scared to death” that her sister Bonny Jacobs, a United Airlines flight attendant, was on one of the four hijacked airplanes that were flown into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people.
After learning that her sister was safe at her Pennsylvania home, “I went straight to Bonny’s house,” Biden told The Associated Press on Saturday as she and her sister remembered that day.
On Sunday, Jill Biden, now the first lady, will mark the 21st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by delivering remarks at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania — accompanied by Jacobs.
The 40 passengers and crew aboard that United Airlines flight fought back against their hijackers, thwarting a feared attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
“I called Bonny to see where she was because I was scared to death ... I didn’t know where she was, whether she was flying, not flying, where she was,” Jill Biden recalled. “And then I found out she was home.”
Biden had gone to teach her class at Delaware Technical Community College, then went straight to her sister’s house after school was dismissed.Joe Biden, then a U.S. senator, was on an Amtrak train barreling toward Washington when his wife got through to him. They were on the phone when she cried out, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God” after an airplane hit the second World Trade Center tower.
Jacobs said she had gotten home around 2 a.m. on Sept. 11 after a late flight. She slept a little, got up to help get her kids, then 11 and 7, off to school, turned off her phone and went back to bed.“So when I got up around noon, it was such a gorgeous day,” she said. “I had my coffee. I sat outside. I literally said out loud, ‘I’m doing nothing today, this day is gorgeous.’”
She saw the phone beeping when she went inside. Jill had left a message asking if she’d been watching television. She turned it on and saw replays of the attack on the World Trade Center.
“I started to shake,” Jacobs said, adding that she went upstairs to get dressed and “put my clothes on inside out” and spent the rest of the day watching TV.“And then the first person that came to the house was Jill,” she said. “I hadn’t called her to come, but she just showed up, and she was there for me, as usual.”Jacobs said she usually flies on the Sept. 11 anniversary to pay tribute to her fallen United Airlines colleagues and as a way of distracting herself “because it’s so upsetting.” But she wanted to be with the first lady in Shanksville to offer the same kind of support her big sister has given her.
“It’s such a special moment to be together with her,” Jacobs said. “She was there for me at the time that it happened and she actually is always there for me. She is my rock. Everybody should have a rock in their life, and she is mine.”
“And it’s such as special thing to share it with her as a flight attendant and that she’s there, you know, supporting us,” Jacobs said.In addition to laying a wreath at the memorial and delivering remarks, the first lady was joining members of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA to honor the Flight 93 crew members.In her prepared remarks for Sunday, Jill Biden says that after the shock of 9/11 “settled into sorrow” and she had spoken with her husband and children, her thoughts turned to her sister, who continues to work as a flight attendant with United Airlines.
“It’s a job that she has loved for many years and I knew that the weight of this tragedy would be heavier for her,” the first lady says. “When I got to her house, I realized that I was right. She hadn’t just lost colleagues. She had lost friends.”
She adds: “But I know that, as we learned more about that dark day, she felt pride for what happened here as well, pride that it was fellow flight attendants and the passengers of United Flight 93 who fought back, who helped stop the plane from taking an untold number of lives in our nation’s capital.”Joe Biden, now president, was to commemorate the day at the Pentagon. Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, were to be at the New York remembrance.On 9/11, then-Sen. Biden arrived in Washington to see smoke in the sky from the crash at the Pentagon. He wanted to go to the floor of the Senate, but the Capitol and the surrounding complex of offices and official buildings, including the Supreme Court, had been evacuated.
He was turned away by Capitol police, who said there was a risk that the building was a target.
Jill Biden said scores of lives were saved — including possibly her husband’s — by the actions of everyone aboard United Airlines Flight 93.
“That plane was headed for the U.S. Capitol and so I think it’s important that every year we go to Shanksville and we remember those who fought: the flight attendants, the captains, the pilots, all of those who fought to save those lives,” the first lady said in the interview.
She said her message Sunday would be, “We will never forget. We will never forget.”
“There were so many things swirling that day because I was worried about Joe’s safety, but I just could not imagine that my sister was on one of those flights,” the first lady said.
“I don’t know what word I want to use. I was so worried and I don’t even think that’s strong enough,” she added.
Jacobs interjected to say 9/11 was “surreal.”
Jill Biden added: “The whole thing was so surreal, but I was just, you know, just really praying that she was not on one of those flights.”
https://apnews.com/article/pennsylvania-jill-biden-congress-government-and-politics-adf38eae4d6395768b096f57218a3f79
سیلابی تباہی تصور سے زیادہ، گلوبل وارمنگ دوسروں کی غلطی سزا پاکستان بھگت رہا ہے، بحالی میں مدد کی جائے، سیکرٹری جنرل اقوام متحدہ
https://jang.com.pk/news/1134404