Our agile mayor showed once again that he's far too shrewd a politician to be taken by surprise when the bigoted wackos tried to bait him over attending the 9/11 commemorations. Arising from the crypt, chief ghoul Rudy Giuliani demanded Mamdani stay away because he was just like the 9/11 attackers but just hides it better. All Muslims, said RG, want to "dominate us" because of their "extremist religious education." Imagine anyone daring to say that about Orthodox Jewish billionaires.
Maintaining his signature smile, Zohran didn't answer Giuliani's racist attack. Instead, he released 170,000 pages of previously hidden documents showing that the entire political establishment—including a certain predecessor—had encouraged people to return to lower Manhattan while systematically covering up the extreme health risks that first responders, office workers, and local residents ran in doing so.
The memorial added a seventh bell—in memory of those who died of 9/11-related diseases—to the six rings that correspond to the attacks themselves, suggesting that the aftermath was another form of attack on Americans. A firefighter's union official called it "the atrocity that happened after 9/11."
Given the need for nonstop news coverage of anniversary #25, reporters couldn't avoid delving into the documents and talking about how ruthlessly city and federal officials lied to us to make sure Wall Street was back in business and economic activity quickly resumed. There was discussion of how we slowly learned how poisonous the post-attack air and dust were, how doctors noticed "WTC cough" among the guys at city fire stations, and the decade-long battle to establish the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act to provide treatments and care to the thousands affected.
For the first time, 9/11 ceased to be only and exclusively about American victimhood. Instead, we edged gingerly into a discussion of how government should—and often does not—treat its people. The Fox ecosphere was predictably incensed at the lack of "patriotism," which for them means going along with the bosses no matter what.
It was an admirable performance and probably shifted our understanding of that historic event permanently. However, Mamdani missed his chance to make an equally devastating point: the 9/11 relief fund for those who need it should not have to exist at all.
Under a humane medical system, everyone suffering from cancer, COPD, or the many other terrible maladies produced by the 9/11 toxins would already be taken care of without cost. A single-payer, European-style system that did away with private insurance parasites would have attended to the firefighters, EMT workers, nearby residents, and downtown workers as a matter of course. In an everyone-in/nobody out system, lengthy battles in Congress over appropriation special funds for a specific group would make no sense.
Mamdani is officially a backer of the New York Health Act, which would create just such a system in our state and pave the way for the national version that must come sooner or later before we bankrupt ourselves. For whatever reason, he chose not to amplify his critical message to include how our government abused not just 9/11 survivors but continues to do so to everyone, every day, by keeping us in the current restrictive, abusive, expensive, and dysfunctional healthcare system.
Let's hope he does better next time.
Tim Frasca is a member of the NYC-DSA Healthcare Working Group
All opinions are of Tim's own. Beyond Diagnosis is focused on amplifying voices across the left on all topics of healthcare. Please reach out to the Working Group if there is a topic in healthcare you'd like to write about.