3242 The Unhonored Others

Saturday, January 29, 2011

"Every true genius is bound to be naive"
-- Friedrich Schiller --

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There's been a lot of ... reminiscence? ... the past few days on the 25th anniversary of the shuttle explosion. I am a bit annoyed that almost all of it is all about the teacher who was on the shuttle. Boston.com's "Big Picture" did a whole photo essay on her yesterday.

There were six other people on that shuttle! I challenge anyone to name ONE of them without looking it up. They were not less valuable. What happened to them was not less horrific. I hate the way they have been pushed aside.

I guess the strength of my anger comes a lot from 9/11 and Jay's reaction. There were a few thousand people who died in the towers, but we have ignored all the people who died in the ripples. Jay was one of them. He fought his illness hard, until the towers fell. He thought the world would be plunged into war, and he realized he would not be able to protect me, that in fact he would be a burden on me in the hard times to come, so he gave up and died. He gave up that day, stopped fighting. We all could see it.

I wonder how many very ill people in homes and hospitals died in September and October of 2001. You know how "they" say death rates go up after Christmas, people who hang on until after the holidays? People can choose to live or choose to die. I think a lot of people (who might even have eventually recovered) gave up when they thought they might have been a burden to their loved ones. I consider a lot of those people victims of 9/11 as much as the ones in the towers.

They got no honor.

Their families didn't get to share in the millions of dollars handed out to "the victims of 9/11". Their names don't get read on the anniversary. That pisses me off. I consider Jay a victim of 9/11. Yes, I know Jay probably wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway, but that's not the point. The point is that there's more damage than the obvious, more than the famous, and we ignore all the others. Like they don't count.

To refresh your memories, the others killed in the Challenger disaster were Ellison Onizuka, Mike Smith, Dick Scobee, Greg Jarvis, Ron McNair and Judith Resnik. Have you ever even heard of them? How do their families feel when everyone acts like the only person on the shuttle was Christa McAuliffe?
.