Jim Stillman
NevarVictims and Heroes; Confusing them Devaluates the Greatness of the Latter.
September 3rd 2007 18:17
I am extremely ambivalent about this post.
On the one hand, I am certain to be misunderstood by those who believe I am casting aspersions on those who were killed on September 11th at the World Trade Center or those police officers, in Hillsborough County, Florida, who have been killed by punks and lowlife bastards who have fired guns randomly into police cars or Pat Tillman, killed in Afghanistan by “friendly fire”. On the other hand, I am bothered by assigning the term “hero” to those who were and are more properly, “victims”.
Take, first, the victims/heroes of 9/11, 425 of the of 3226 victims on that date were emergency responders and they, and countless others--such as the passengers on Flight 93 who overwhelmed the hijackers on their plane—who actively rescued others that day were clearly heroes. But it is no dishonor to any of the victims to say that most of them were civilians who acted as civilians, and who were killed for no other reason than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They died because they simply chose to go to work, or go on an airplane. Those who put their own lives in immediate peril in order to save the lives of others are clearly “heroes”; the remaining dead and their survivors are not marginalized by treating them as victims.
One of the results of the treatment of a victim as hero became obvious in the establishment of the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, an unprecedented program in the United States. The Fund should be compared to the lack of financial government assistance to the victims in New Orleans from Katrina. To some extent, the difference in the treatment of the victims of both tragedies can be explained by the designation of those innocent civilians who died on 9/11 as “heroes”.
I am compelled to digress to study one or two other differences between 9/11 and Katrina that explain why there was such a difference in governmental financial assistance.
In the United States, typically, the families of victims of crimes do not receive full compensation for the lost wages of their loved ones, unless they can win a lawsuit in court against the rare wealthy perpetrator, or by pinning responsibility on a corporation with deep pockets. In America, for the uninsured, losses typically lie where they fall: on the shoulders of those who suffer them, and of their families.
But Americans came to view the victims who died and were injured on 9/11 as more than the victims of a tragic criminal, terror attack -- or even the victims, arguably, of the negligence of the airlines in not reinforcing cockpits or taking other anti-hijacking approaches. We came to see them as heroes who had borne the brunt of an attack that had been meant to target our whole nation; they were either firefighters or police officers who had bravely tried to rescue the direct victims, or they were ordinary people who could have been any one of us - and who were attacked because they shared a characteristic with all of us: They were Americans.
In the end, the Fund gave out almost $7 billion to the victims and their families, and the sums were extraordinarily high, as compared to the sums that would have been granted under either a public or private insurance program. Victims and their families received an average of $2.08 million.
The Fund's unusually high compensation levels resulted from the joinder of two separate factors. First, and most importantly, the Fund was part of a deal made between the White House and Congressional Democrats. The White House wanted to substantially limit the liability of the airlines to the victims of those killed on that day, in order to keep the airplane industry afloat in the wake of 9/11. The Democrats allowed this, but also demanded that the Government step in and pay the victims (and their families) something like the same sort of damages they would have received in a lawsuit; if the airlines were to escape any liability, the Democrats argued, then someone would have to step in to compensate the victims, and it ought to be the federal government in the absence of any alternative.
In sum, the extraordinary payments by our government were thought to be justified because the victims of 9/11 died under extraordinary circumstances. Katrina, too, is extraordinary - but in a different way.
Much of the losses of Katrina was the result of governmental misjudgments, miscalculations and simply negligence. While there has been federal financial institutional assistance, direct financial aid to individual victims of Katrina, on the scope of the 9/11 Fund has not come about. There are several reasons.
First, it is obvious that the public does not think of the victims of Katrina as heroes--and there is little reason to think that the public point of view will change as time passes.
There are few, if any, heroic rescue workers among the dead or injured. Moreover, the blow was struck not by an enemy of America, for ideological reasons, but by Nature, for reasons only meteorologists can truly understand. But this does not change the consequences to the victims.
Someone trying to distinguish the thousands of dead in New Orleans, and the thousands of dead in New York, would have trouble distinguishing the victims' moral argument for redress - at least, insofar as the New Orleans victims are compared with the 9/11 civilian victims, rather than those who were firefighters or police officers.
From reports in the media, the allegations of government negligence concerning the events before and after Katrina seem, at a minimum, no less serious than the allegations of airline and airport negligence which led to the 9/11 Fund.
Indeed, it's possible that facts supporting allegations of the government's pre- and post-Katrina negligence are much stronger than those supporting the airlines' pre-9/11 negligence; the operative model of a hijacking, pre-9/11, involved hostages, not planes-as-bombs. In contrast, Katrina's advent and strength were predicted accurately in advance, yet preparations and response fell short. No one who'd heard the coverage woke up the morning Katrina hit, to be surprised by the devastation. The main surprise, with Katrina, has been the seeming inadequacy of both the evacuation, and the post-hurricane response.
In the end, the ultimate reason for treating the families differently has to be the moral status of the 9/11 victims. Hero or victim.
We have a bad habit misusing the term, “hero”, when really referring to a tragic victim. Sometimes the misuse is a deliberate move for cynical political ends. Witness Pat Tillman’s death and Jessica Lynch heroism the year before. Typically, the Bush administration announces a dramatic story to distract the American public from the more unpleasant facts.
Pat Tillman left a promising career with the National Football League to join the armed forces. Did this, of and by itself, make him a “hero”? There may be people who disagree with me, but just joining the army may be, and is, admirable, does result in sacrifice and conceivably result in being placed in danger, but does not equal heroism. Pat Tillman was killed by that which we now know to be “friendly fire”, perhaps accidental, perhaps intentional. He is clearly a victim but to be a hero means more.
During the past years, several police officers in the Tampa area were killed as a result of firing of guns into police cars. In one incident, the officer was parked; in another, shots were fired into a police car traveling down a highway. In neither case were the officers specific targets, in neither case was the officer engaged in an arrest or a chase, they were victims. In another instance, a police officer was shot and killed attempting to arrest a bank robber; she was clearly a hero.
Why does it matter? By misusing the terms and applying them incorrectly or randomly, consequences to the victim/hero become arbitrary and, perhaps, unjust.
On the one hand, I am certain to be misunderstood by those who believe I am casting aspersions on those who were killed on September 11th at the World Trade Center or those police officers, in Hillsborough County, Florida, who have been killed by punks and lowlife bastards who have fired guns randomly into police cars or Pat Tillman, killed in Afghanistan by “friendly fire”. On the other hand, I am bothered by assigning the term “hero” to those who were and are more properly, “victims”.
Take, first, the victims/heroes of 9/11, 425 of the of 3226 victims on that date were emergency responders and they, and countless others--such as the passengers on Flight 93 who overwhelmed the hijackers on their plane—who actively rescued others that day were clearly heroes. But it is no dishonor to any of the victims to say that most of them were civilians who acted as civilians, and who were killed for no other reason than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They died because they simply chose to go to work, or go on an airplane. Those who put their own lives in immediate peril in order to save the lives of others are clearly “heroes”; the remaining dead and their survivors are not marginalized by treating them as victims.
One of the results of the treatment of a victim as hero became obvious in the establishment of the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, an unprecedented program in the United States. The Fund should be compared to the lack of financial government assistance to the victims in New Orleans from Katrina. To some extent, the difference in the treatment of the victims of both tragedies can be explained by the designation of those innocent civilians who died on 9/11 as “heroes”.
I am compelled to digress to study one or two other differences between 9/11 and Katrina that explain why there was such a difference in governmental financial assistance.
In the United States, typically, the families of victims of crimes do not receive full compensation for the lost wages of their loved ones, unless they can win a lawsuit in court against the rare wealthy perpetrator, or by pinning responsibility on a corporation with deep pockets. In America, for the uninsured, losses typically lie where they fall: on the shoulders of those who suffer them, and of their families.
But Americans came to view the victims who died and were injured on 9/11 as more than the victims of a tragic criminal, terror attack -- or even the victims, arguably, of the negligence of the airlines in not reinforcing cockpits or taking other anti-hijacking approaches. We came to see them as heroes who had borne the brunt of an attack that had been meant to target our whole nation; they were either firefighters or police officers who had bravely tried to rescue the direct victims, or they were ordinary people who could have been any one of us - and who were attacked because they shared a characteristic with all of us: They were Americans.
In the end, the Fund gave out almost $7 billion to the victims and their families, and the sums were extraordinarily high, as compared to the sums that would have been granted under either a public or private insurance program. Victims and their families received an average of $2.08 million.
The Fund's unusually high compensation levels resulted from the joinder of two separate factors. First, and most importantly, the Fund was part of a deal made between the White House and Congressional Democrats. The White House wanted to substantially limit the liability of the airlines to the victims of those killed on that day, in order to keep the airplane industry afloat in the wake of 9/11. The Democrats allowed this, but also demanded that the Government step in and pay the victims (and their families) something like the same sort of damages they would have received in a lawsuit; if the airlines were to escape any liability, the Democrats argued, then someone would have to step in to compensate the victims, and it ought to be the federal government in the absence of any alternative.
In sum, the extraordinary payments by our government were thought to be justified because the victims of 9/11 died under extraordinary circumstances. Katrina, too, is extraordinary - but in a different way.
Much of the losses of Katrina was the result of governmental misjudgments, miscalculations and simply negligence. While there has been federal financial institutional assistance, direct financial aid to individual victims of Katrina, on the scope of the 9/11 Fund has not come about. There are several reasons.
First, it is obvious that the public does not think of the victims of Katrina as heroes--and there is little reason to think that the public point of view will change as time passes.
There are few, if any, heroic rescue workers among the dead or injured. Moreover, the blow was struck not by an enemy of America, for ideological reasons, but by Nature, for reasons only meteorologists can truly understand. But this does not change the consequences to the victims.
Someone trying to distinguish the thousands of dead in New Orleans, and the thousands of dead in New York, would have trouble distinguishing the victims' moral argument for redress - at least, insofar as the New Orleans victims are compared with the 9/11 civilian victims, rather than those who were firefighters or police officers.
From reports in the media, the allegations of government negligence concerning the events before and after Katrina seem, at a minimum, no less serious than the allegations of airline and airport negligence which led to the 9/11 Fund.
Indeed, it's possible that facts supporting allegations of the government's pre- and post-Katrina negligence are much stronger than those supporting the airlines' pre-9/11 negligence; the operative model of a hijacking, pre-9/11, involved hostages, not planes-as-bombs. In contrast, Katrina's advent and strength were predicted accurately in advance, yet preparations and response fell short. No one who'd heard the coverage woke up the morning Katrina hit, to be surprised by the devastation. The main surprise, with Katrina, has been the seeming inadequacy of both the evacuation, and the post-hurricane response.
In the end, the ultimate reason for treating the families differently has to be the moral status of the 9/11 victims. Hero or victim.
We have a bad habit misusing the term, “hero”, when really referring to a tragic victim. Sometimes the misuse is a deliberate move for cynical political ends. Witness Pat Tillman’s death and Jessica Lynch heroism the year before. Typically, the Bush administration announces a dramatic story to distract the American public from the more unpleasant facts.
Pat Tillman left a promising career with the National Football League to join the armed forces. Did this, of and by itself, make him a “hero”? There may be people who disagree with me, but just joining the army may be, and is, admirable, does result in sacrifice and conceivably result in being placed in danger, but does not equal heroism. Pat Tillman was killed by that which we now know to be “friendly fire”, perhaps accidental, perhaps intentional. He is clearly a victim but to be a hero means more.
During the past years, several police officers in the Tampa area were killed as a result of firing of guns into police cars. In one incident, the officer was parked; in another, shots were fired into a police car traveling down a highway. In neither case were the officers specific targets, in neither case was the officer engaged in an arrest or a chase, they were victims. In another instance, a police officer was shot and killed attempting to arrest a bank robber; she was clearly a hero.
Why does it matter? By misusing the terms and applying them incorrectly or randomly, consequences to the victim/hero become arbitrary and, perhaps, unjust.
| 52 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
Comment by youranter
youranter
Opinions
opinionatedranter
Tales From The Green Lantern
In the case of 9/11, that was a man-made disaster that shook America to its foundations. And America responded admirably. No, not all the victims were 'heros'. But they were different in a true sense of the word and that's where we fall down, by labelling everyone as one thing or another and the meaning, as you so correctly stated, becomes diluted.
Is this a fault of our educational system that todays generation can't differentiate between one 'hero' and the next?
Comment by Jim Stillman
Comment by Michaelie
Flick Wit
Michaelie
Comment by Michaelie
Flick Wit
Michaelie