Newspapers and magazine retrospectives of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks tend to frame the attacks as a discrete event. In their telling, the nation was attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2011. They killed around 3,000 people in one day, who were mourned and continue to be mourned.
The problem with this mainstream narrative is that it frames those attacks as something singular and isolated: they happened, and people died tragically on that horrific day. But that is not the reality lived by hundreds of thousands of 9/11 World Trade Center first responders and survivors. For them, it's not over: the death toll continues to mount every week since. It will continue to do so late into this century. For them, 9/11 is a 20-year (and counting) ordeal of mass death.
This is the untold 9/11 narrative, in which the United States was attacked; and then, in the days and months after, first responders and the people that lived, worked and studied in lower Manhattan and western Brooklyn were betrayed both by municipal officials and the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency. The reason, of course, relates to money: Officials in both agencies were more concerned amount preserving the pulse of Wall Street than the lungs of close to a half million people, including roughly 90,000 rescue and recovery workers....
