Ground Zero volunteers
Keshet
Apologies for the length, but I think you'll be glad to read the
included essay, "Year Zero: In which I became a Red Cross courier"
by Jonathan Wallace.
It's a good read--a well-written, very "poetic" description of
volunteer work at Ground Zero. Real volunteerism, not the self-
serving kind that Scientology practices. Take particular note of
the detail. Compare that to the vagueness of the Volunteer Minister
reports. This is one of the reasons the VM reports lack credibility
--they are just too general to be "real". For all we know, they may
have been written by someone who never left the comfort and safety
of his or her own family room (or Org).
VMs don't mention the "Frozen Zone" or "The Pile"; they don't
mention the still-burning fires and acrid smoke; the constant
wetness from the dust being hosed down; the mulitple checkpoints
and the plainclothes police with semi-automatic weapons guarding
the site. They don't even mention street names or subway stops.
Certainly if they were at Ground Zero like they insist, they
would have heard or seen or experienced these things.
The VM reports don't have sufficient detail about physcial
conditions to be credible, and yet we know the VMs were there:
Mark Ebner has seen them. This suggests that these Scientologists
are so engrossed in "delivering the tech" and reporting their
"stats" as to be completely oblivious to the ruin around them.
Their hearts and minds have no room for anything but Scientology.
The thing I find most disturbing is that there is no expression
of the emotional impact that Ground Zero has had on these
Scientologists...none, that is, except delight in their supposed
Big Wins with their silly Touch Assists and drive-by TWTH
bookletting. Not a thought about the devastation, not a thought
about the thousands of human beings still buried in "The Pile".
Not even a hint of the morbid curiosity many people exhibit at
accident sites (it's not nice, but it is *human* nature).
It is UNhuman to not be overwhelmed by what happened in New York
(and elsewhere). It is UNhuman to have no desire to express that
horror. Every person I have talked to about the terrorist attacks
--*every*single*one*--has tried to put voice to their shock and
disbelief. Did the VMs? Not in anything I've read. Sadly, UNhuman
seems to be the norm for these Scientologists. Scientology has
sucked their human emotions and intellects right out of them.
Ted Mayett and I have had an ongoing argument for many months,
years even, and I have finally realized he is right: these
Scientologists are victims themselves. As much as I want to rage
against their self-congratulatory reports, self-serving publicity,
and the apparent ease with which they use this montrous event for
their own self-aggrandizement (notice a theme here?), I must remind
myself that they are *victims*, damaged by the Scientology contagion
and rendered incapable of demonstrating ordinary human morals and
emotions.
As victims, they deserve our pity and aid.
Keshet
------
Forwarded message (a *real* volunteer experience):
From: j...@bway.net
Subject: Year zero: I become a red cross courier
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 03:22:44 GMT
Year Zero
In which I become a Red Cross Courier
by Jonathan Wallace j...@bway.net
October 20, 2001
Year Zero is an episodic series of essays on ethical and
practical implications of the present crisis. Subscribe here:
http://www.greenspun.com/spam/home.tcl?domain=ethspec
All essays archived at http://www.spectacle.org/yearzero/
Worry is wasteful and useless in times like these; I won't be
made useless.--Jewel
For several weeks we had lived with a deep but general anxiety.
At first, for a day or so, we reacted as if to a terrible train
wreck: the destruction of the World Trade Center was a one time
event, with no implications for the future. Then it sank in
quickly that it was the first shot fired in a series, and we
began to think about what might come next.
Nonetheless my wife and I got up each day, took the subway, went
into Manhattan and lived our lives as normally as was possible
in the shadow of six thousand deaths. There was no specific
threat to focus on, just the knowledge that there were men out
there, and possibly among us, ready to kill more of us when
ordered to or when the opportunity arose.
On Sunday, October 7, after a walk in the woods, we came back
home to change clothes before going to a barbecue at the home
of a new friend. I turned on CNN and we learned that the bombing
had begun. Our fears crystallized even before we saw the Osama
bin Laden video, for we felt that after three weeks of hush the
war at home would begin now in earnest.
Then the network ran the bin Laden tape, another confident chess
move of a formidable adversary, and we listened to him say:
America has been filled with horror from north to south and east
to west, and thanks be to God that what America is tasting now
is only a copy of we have tasted....God has blessed a group of
vanguard Muslims, the forefront of Islam, to destroy America.
We felt a pervasive fear at this, like a fog which interferes
with visibility without eliminating it. When Tony Blair came on,
with his intelligent, confident style, which almost succeeded in
making the horrible normal and able to be fronted, we responded
with almost pathetic appreciation, that the British were our
friends and so avid to help and defend us.
At the barbecue, we met an old acquaintance, a woman whose son
had gone to school with ours, who told us she had been driving
for the Red Cross. She was an English professor at a local college
who was glad to drive because she had no other skills to offer. I
immediately knew I wanted to do the same.
The next morning, back in New York City, I got on the subway with
a new appreciation of its topography. I had learned to think like
Al Quaeda. If a suicide bomber was planning to detonate himself
on the subway, I thought, he would most likely do so when the
train passes under the river. I looked for the terrorist in every
car--and found him, for everywhere, not surprisingly, were vaguely
Middle Eastern-looking men wearing thick clothing or carrying
backpacks.
At Fourteenth Street I walked the two blocks to the PATH station.
There was a crowd of people standing on the sidewalk and police
cars nearby with lights flashing; as I watched, a van pulled up,
BOMB SQUAD stencilled on the side. It occurred to me that an Al
Quaeda bomb would probably be strong enugh to buckle the sidewalk
and dump us all down the hole; I drew back a hundred more feet,
realized the fallacy of watching and the fact that it might take
more than an hour to clear the station.
I started to walk up to Twenty-third Street, the next PATH
station, eating a bagel as I walked. Not because I really
expected the station to be operational, but to have something
to do. A young woman, college age, tapped me on the shoulder
and said, "I know you didn't drop it on purpose, but I wanted
you to know I picked up your bag." I stared at her with wild
incomprehension. I hadn't dropped my briefcase; what bag was
she talking about? I understood finally, that she was telling
me I had littered: I had dropped the paper bag in which the
bagel came. I wanted to say something like, "We're bombing
Afghanistan and I couldn't take the PATH train to work because
of a bomb scare, and you're remonstrating with me about
littering." But I realized for her, God was in the details--
just as for me, the devil was. So I thanked her and went on.
The Twenty-third street PATH station was of course closed
because of the bomb investigation at Fourteenth. Someone told
me of a free bus to a ferry which would take me to Hoboken.
From there I knew I could improvise a route to Newark. I
caught the bus which threaded its way in a long loop around
the city, taking me back past Fourteenth Street where I could
see the bomb squad was still at work.
The ferry station, at Thirty Fourth Street on the Hudson, was
packed with people who usually took the PATH. The day had
turned blustery cold, a winter's day, and I was underdressed
because I had not expected to be outdoors. I stood with a
great throng of people on a floating dock, listening to its
timbers shift and groan. As a New Yorker I rarely talk to
strangers but, the rules already broken, I joined a
conversation about September 11, asking a man who said he had
worked at Five World Trade Center about the fate of the
building. It is the one with the Borders bookstore, the
building I walked through every morning on the way to the
train, and I had seen from Wall Street a few days before
that it was still intact but with all the windows blown out.
"The front is all right," he said, "but the back of the
building is missing." He had arrived from New Jersey via the
PATH just after the second plane hit, and he had had to
decide whether to evacuate the building ("the whole place
smelled of kerosene") or get back on the train. He did the
latter. It was the second time I had heard of a train
evacuating people after both towers were in flames. He had
watched the rest from the Jersey side.
I told him about my experience emerging from the subway to
the street and a woman who was with him said, "I must have
been on that same train." She worked in Two World Trade
Center, hence stood and watched her office burning.
Co-workers who had just gotten out grabbed her by the arms
and hauled her uptown to their company's emergency center.
On the ferry, I was very cold but interested to view Ground
Zero from the river as we passed the lower tip of Manhattan.
I saw the Winter Garden in Battery Park City, where falling
debris had punctured the greenhouse roof and killed people
trying to shelter there, and the huge rubble heap known as
the Pile, still leaking smoke in numerous places.
This is the way we live now. I walked from the Colgate ferry
stop to the Exchange Place station. I was almost three hours
late to work due to what I later heard was a false alarm due
to someone leaving a bag with an appliance--a vacuum cleaner
or coffee maker, I don't remember--on the platform.
That night my wife and I walked over to the Red Cross office
in Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn. The place, with its somewhat
disorganized bustle, was very cheery. The connection was
immediate: I didn't need to pass a job interview, or convince
anyone I could help. There was a short evaluation--what was my
relationhip to what happened? Did I suffer from asthma or other
health concerns? A minute later, I was signed up to drive the
next night, from ten until six in the morning.
The Red Cross' Brooklyn facility is an old, squat building that
could have originally been a school or some type of
administrative office. The Red Cross was about to sell it, and
move to smaller quarters, when September 11 came. It was chosen,
over the Manhattan facility on West 66th Street, to serve as
headquarters because of its greater size. It has the depressing
architecture and green decor of a building born for bureaucracy,
but it is floated by the tremendous spirit of the organization,
which within a day after the planes hit the towers had started
bringing volunteers in from all over the country.
Previously I knew little about the Red Cross except for the
cliched image of the ambulance on a World War I battlefield
and the occasional news report about relief efforts in Third
World countries. I learned that the New York chapter had
concentrated on two efforts: blood donations, and going to the
sites of the city's ten to fifteen daily fires, providing
shelter and support to the victims. Several Red Cross
volunteers, there supporting a fire brigade, died at the
World Trade Center on September 11.
The volunteers elsewhere in the country concentrate on
hurricanes and floods. In every state the Red Cross has a
local chapter supported by these volunteers, who donate major
chunks of their time to the organization's routine activities,
and seek occasional assignments to large disasters elsewhere
in the country. Because they have to be able to leave for
weeks at a time, many Red Cross volunteers are retired, while
others work for state governments or other employers who can
tolerate long absences.
On Tuesday night, I reported to a small room on the first
floor of headquarters where the courier operation was based.
We had a dispatcher, a woman named Melissa, who wrote out
white slips telling us where to go and whom to pick up, then
handed us car keys and a cell phone. In the lot out back were
fifty or sixty Red Cross vehicles, including Ryder trucks and
fifteen passenger vans, and some donated BMW's to which all of
the couriers clamored to be assigned.
It was like a local car service assigned to a greater good. My
fellow couriers included a Manhattan doorman, a computer guy who
worked for the city, an unemployed airport freight handler, an
emergency med tech, a young female accountant, and a technology
auditor who also was a volunteer mounted officer for the Parks
Department. I heard there was another lawyer driving, but I
never met him.
The first night, I mainly shuttled out of town volunteers between
Red Cross facilities and five Manhattan hotels where the
organization housed most of its people. All of these were in the
West 40's and 50's. To get there, I took the Brooklyn bridge
entrance a hundred yards from headquarters, where I passed
through a police checkpoint, then took an emergency lane across
the bridge. Most of that night the bridge was empty anyway, but
on other nights I had the pleasure of breezing across while two
other lanes of traffic inched along. Whatever I drove qualified
as an emergency vehicle; most of the time when I showed my Red
Cross ID to the cops, they would wave me through, though at
certain checkpoints they would search the van in a desultory
way, sometimes opening a door and looking in, other times
shining a flashlight through the window.
The last time I had been on the Brooklyn Bridge was on September
11, running away from the attack. I exited and hooked a left at
Chambers, where I had to pass a serious checkpoint to get into
the "frozen zone"; I crossed its northern side, with an
occasional sideways glance to the bent steel skeletons and
laboring cranes of Ground Zero. The streets here were always wet,
as they were washed all the time to lay the pervasive white dust.
During this traverse I could smell the acrid smoke from the Pile.
At the West Side Highway, closed to everything except emergency
vehicles, I had to pass another checkpoint, this one staffed by
rather frightening men in plainclothes with semi-automatic
weapons. In a few minutes, halfway up Manhattan, there would be
one more.
Everywhere in the frozen zone and on the West Side Highway one
ignored traffic lights, which were still functioning, or at best
treated a red light as a stop sign--roll up, take a look, pass
through. Along the highway were the huge trucks being used to haul
the wreckage to the landfill in Staten Island. At 55th street,
Pier 94, the center for the bereaved families, where I made a
number of trips.
The volunteers were housed at special Red Cross rates at elegant
hotels like the Parker Meridian and the Marriott. In four nights
of driving so far, I have probably ferried 100 people, but the
majority of them have crystallized into one figure, the
ur-volunteer, a pear-shaped, white-haired grandmother exuding
strength and competence, with a midwestern or southern accent
and a friendly amazement at the city's traffic and noise. I took
fifteen of them in the large van one night and they all had
trouble climbing in--their strength, while immense, was
psychological, force of will rather than muscles. I adored these
women, felt wonderfully grateful that they had come to our city
to organize local volunteers, care for children, serve food, run
supply depots, and do counseling and social work.
On my second night of driving, Melissa the dispatcher casually
asked me to take a cargo van of blankets and sweatshirts into
Ground Zero, to the Red Cross Respite Center #3 at the Marriott
Marquis Financial Center hotel on West Street. I went through
the Chambers Street checkpoint, then made a left just short of
the highway and passed another checkpoint to go down West
Street past the former site of the twin towers. The air was
incredibly acrid, as the ruins are still aflame in numerous
places. As I inched down West Street, I kept looking out the
van window at the Pile, where firemen were still hosing down
the flames. I realized that tonight was the one month
anniversary of the attack. I had heard of month-long fires
before, but only in coal mines and thick forests.
Looking at the heaps of concrete and the twisted steel
skeletons my mind went quite blank, as it had when I watched
the buildings falling on CNN: though I knew intellectually
that the remains of more than four thousand people are in the
Pile, I was unable to acknowledge that a scene already more
disturbing than anything I ever thought I would see in my
lifetime, was also a mass grave.
Under the glare of the spotlights, the scene was as hellish as
you would expect. The faces of the people everywhere were
expressionless or solemn. Most people at the site were not
wearing gauze masks or respirators, despite the intensity of
the acrid smoke, which I could still feel in my throat the next
day, after a visit that lasted only a half hour.
At the Red Cross orientation session, we were told the three
"S"'s: no sightseeing, no snapshots, no souvenirs. When in
Ground Zero, you go directly to your assigned area, do your job
and leave when you're through. People who wander away are
arrested. Reportedly there are troops with night vision sniper
scopes in buildings around the site, and when they see anybody
who does not clearly belong where he is, especially if he is
picking up rubble, they are on him in a moment.
I had to pass through the entire site to get to Respite #3,
which is on the southern side. I pulled in to the loading dock
of the Marriott where several large volunteer workers had my
van emptied in a moment. I talked to them and to a security
officer and a Red Cross supervisor. Their sheer normality,
their friendly casualness in the shadow of the Pile, seemed
remarkable to me. Threading my way back out, staring again at
the Pile, I remembered that the other Marriott, a block away,
had been destroyed in the collapse. In innocent times, I had
been to meetings and computer industry trade shows in both hotels.
A four hour shift might involve two or three trips. In the time
in between the couriers sit and talk--about the attacks but also
about Star Trek and about the events of the Red Cross day, like
the volunteer whose Red Cross ID was pulled for breaking the rule
of the three S's and wandering around Ground Zero. People
speculate about getting in the metalworkers union and getting a
job at Ground Zero paying forty dollars an hour. The doorman
told us how the rich tenants shower him with gifts when they are
vacating their apartments--appliances, record collections, even
jewelry they no longer want. Several of us had been at or near
the towers on the morning of September 11; we exchanged our
stories while the dispatcher, always an out of town volunteer,
listened with interest. When another driver and I discovered
that we fled across the bridge at the same time, Jennifer,
Melissa's successor, asked if either of us had thought about
running in rather than away--an indiscreet question saved by
her naive and friendly candor. No, we both said without
hesitation, but neither uttered what we were thinking: that we
would be better men if we had, but were both here because we
hadn't.
Another memorable assignment was a trip to the Bellevue emergency
room the third night, to pick up a Red Cross supervisor and a
patient and take them back to their hotel. At Bellevue,
peculiarly, the emergency room is hidden away far inside the
hospital; you can't drive right up to it. I parked the van
illegally on the street and left it with the lights flashing,
then walked the long covered sidewalk to the entrance. Hundreds
of missing posters, which had been put up in the first few days,
had been covered over with plastic to preserve them. I wanted to
stop and look but didn't have time.
Bellevue's is a classic chaotic New York emergency room; I have
been in too many. People on gurneys everywhere awaiting processing,
the interns and nurses shouting to one another, too busy to stop
and direct a passerby. The only thing new and different was the
sign that said, if you have a fever, flu symptoms, or a sore,
please tell us right away. Fear of anthrax, which had just been
found in New York City the day before. I found my passengers: a
gray-haired male supervisor and one of his volunteers, a young
woman exposed to an unknown white powder on her first day with
the Red Cross in New York City. Barefoot and carrying her clothes
in a plastic bag, she was even-tempered but wide-eyed, frightened
but not talking about it. I took her back to her hotel to await
the results of her anthrax test.
Late on the first night, driving had already become a very
comfortable routine. I discovered my favorite routes in and out
of the city; short cuts and tricks; the garage on West 66th
street where we could gas up for free. As a lifelong New Yorker,
I didn't get my driver's license until I was in my thirties, and
for years I had a cautious, distrustful relationship with
automobiles: at the outset I was the type of driver who annoyed
everyone by driving ten miles under the speed limit but who never
got a ticket. The kind who angry drivers flashed with their
headlights when I wandered into the fast lane. But more than a
decade of experience had relaxed me. Now I discovered that I
drew vitality from the mindlessness, the physicality, of driving.
After September 11, I didn't want to work with my mind any more.
For the moment I would rather be a courier than be the CEO of the
Red Cross.
A related realization came at four a.m. as I was driving down
Broadway, heading back to Brooklyn. Earlier that day, I had
started at every backfire, stared intently at every low-flying
plane, played over and over in my imagination the sidewalk
fragmenting and settling in a huge blast, the oncoming fireball,
the agony-snapshot as one's body flew to pieces. Now, driving, I
was concentrating on navigating Columbus Circle, on avoiding the
orange cones in the emergency lane, on living in the mirrors of
the van. I had forgotten fear.
---
[Thank you, Mr. Wallace, for permission to post your essay.]
--
Kes...@despammed.com ** http://thingy.apana.org.au/~fun/scn/racism/
Where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts. Mark Twain
Jim Byrd
one should consider the experiences of a *real* ground zero volunteer - my
cousin.
His office was very near WTC. He set up an emergency morgue, and was busy
processing body bags and typing up death certificates.
Was he at all self-serving about this? Absolutely not. I saw an email he had
written to one other person describing his experiences, but he didn't want it
spread any further than that.
He was recently invited to breakfast with Mayor Guiliani in appreciation for his
efforts.
What is his profession? He is a psych! (psychologist, actually).
Irmgard
not by Scientology, but by the Salvation Army:
http://www.salvationarmy-usaeast.org/goodnews/issues/Special_Edition/1a.htm
Some interesting details (which do not quite fit in with Scientology
reports):
"Only The Salvation Army, the Red Cross and official Office of
Emergency Management personnel are permitted in this area."
http://www.salvationarmy-usaeast.org/disaster/releases.htm#9-15-release1
"Salvation Army is the Only Organization at Ground Zero Providing
Emotional and Spiritual Counseling"
http://www.salvationarmy-usaeast.org/disaster/releases.htm#9-14-release-1
Sorry for the late news - I only learned about it lately through a
small sidenote in a German Christian Magazine.
Regards
Irmgard
Jim Byrd <by...@acm.org> wrote in message news:<v7qmttckeluj55oos...@4ax.com>...