This year though, I’m really more angry than anything.

I understand the need for grieving. That pain doesn’t go away ever. But I am of the camp that believes that the 9/11 families (in part, not the whole) have dragged things out too far and in the wrong way. Compared to families surviving comparable disasters especially, and years ago they were asking for more and more money and getting up in arms about way too many things. Even today watching television, it’s the same faces that have been on the air for years. Of course, I attribute part of this to the networks that continue to follow and build relationships with them. But nonetheless, they’ve had their moment in the sun.

Of course today is different. A decade is an easy metric, one that reminds everyone that the ones they lost wouldn’t have looked, acted, sounded or cared about the same things as they did before the attacks and if they had never happened.

What pisses me off is that the people who didn’t ask for much or even speak out until they were selling their cars and houses for cancer money, the first responders, have barely had coverage proportionally to what these families have. Neither have the soldiers who have taken their place.

Because you know what? These people have the mental scars too. Those sicknesses and burdens. Even worse than many of the people on tv now, because they saw it first hand from the inside, they had the towers fall on THEM. They weren’t going to safety, they were going towards danger to save people they didn’t know. Simply, they were doing their job.

And the fact that not even 3 months after we find out that the bill Congress passed nine years later doesn’t cover cancer there’s no big overblown form of news coverage - like there is with everything else. These people are dying, many of them silently. Why isn’t there as big of a place for them in today’s coverage?

It’s sickening me today more than most.
Because today, as much as we should be honoring and respecting the dead, morning their loss and the losses of their families, we completely forget about the living who are are still fighting.
Because ten years later we’re reflecting on those banners, that feeling of togetherness, that promise and declaration “We will never forget.”

Well, when it comes to the first responders, we have forgotten. And in a very big way.