September 11th Anniversary

Over the past couple months, I got hung up on how some legislators tried to either slash or withhold funding for nuclear disease patients who responded to the Ground Zero scene. I don't remember whether they were national or state-level congresspeople, but Stephen Colbert had to chew them out just to get some health care provided to the 9-11-001 first responders. Thinking about these medical case files and how certain institutions dropped the ball on our 9-11-001 first responders leads me to nothing but frustration.

Meanwhile, I was only 11 y.o. on 9-11-001, but I only resembled a younger child 7 and under, and my sense of civics, sociology, geopolitical drama, basic interpersonal pathology, and similar subject matters back then were even further underdeveloped. Combine that with my autism spectrum diagnosis and lack of family connections to NYC, and I have to admit 9-11-001 had no immediate impact on me. The only things I suffered personally were residual damages that I could only identify in hindsight, such as a big-name Charismatic church leader based less than 3 cities away from where I live. If he would've gotten to know me well enough, I suspect he would've told me, back when he was alive prior to September of '013, that my orientation brings about disasters and tragedies like 9-11-001 because mainstream society didn't want revenge or retribution on my demographic the way extreme fundamentalists often demand. But mostly, I lacked the geopolitical insights as a child to recognize the distinction between Al-Qaeda and non-fundamentalist Muslims who just wanted to go about their daily lives throughout the 00-Agents' Decade at a time when a lot of the American media would obfuscate and blur those lines. And tying those two threads together, the Fundamentalist Church of Evangelica has been forging makeshift alliances with some Orthodox and further right synagogues under the banner of "Judeo-Christian" theopolitics, to the exclusion of not only Muslims whether fundamentalist or not, but also anyone who doesn't believe in Old Testament inspired theocratic legislation.

Nowadays, I feel like a post-Y2K child who only read about 9-11-001 in history textbooks both because of the aforementioned lack of development back when the tragedy happened, and because I have more in common socially with those who were, or look like they were, born in the 00-Agents' Decade who had little or no first-hand experience with 9-11-001 either. It's only in the last few years that I've felt anything, and even then it was only some sociological, theological, and political after-effects, but enough to make me upset with how 9-11-001 has changed American culture.