Sunday, September 11, 2011

First responders decry exclusion from 9/11 ceremony

This seems to me to be backwards. I'm sorry for the victims families, but I feel the people who tried to help others are the ones who should be honored. There is no honor (or dishonor) in being a victim who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I had planned to comment tomorrow on how I don't understand the public reading of the names of the victims, but I didn't expect that they would be honored over the true heroes. I can understand commemorating this traumatic event, and honoring the first responders who risked their lives to try to rescue people, and the passengers of the airplane who forced it down in a place where it would do less harm. I can understand that people who cared about the victims would want to honor them, but I don't understand the reading of their names as part of the official ceremonies. Especially I don't understand their elevation over people who made a choice to risk their lives for others.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/16/new.york.911.memorial/index.html?iref=allsearch

By Jeff Stein, CNN
August 30, 2011 6:06 p.m. EDT

New York (CNN) -- When debris rained from the sky in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, the first responders to the terrorist attack did not turn away. They rushed to the World Trade Center buildings while the world around them crumbled.

Yet now, after all the wreckage has been cleared and the rebuilding has begun, their path is again blocked -- not by flying chunks of smoldering rubble, but by space constraints.

The first responders are not invited to this year's September 11 memorial ceremony at ground zero, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office confirmed Monday.

It's a painful insult for many of the approximately 3,000 men and women who risked their lives, limbs and lungs on that monumental day, puncturing another hole in a still searing wound.

In a statement, Bloomberg spokesman Andrew Brent said the commemoration ceremony is for the victims' families.

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