Editors’ Expressions: Of Profit and Punchline

It took me 20 years to get to the World Trade Center. This recent anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, was my first time. That’s mostly been a function of geography, living on the other coast and rarely having cause to come to New York City. Serving EMS World since even before 9/11, I felt like I had a handle on the significance of the event and sanctity of its grounds.

Walking around the site, finally, on this most recent September 11, I regretted not coming sooner. It was still a larger-than-life experience, poignant and humbling—and yet history and passing years are well along now in doing what they do, invariably, to even the holiest of historical things.

It was later in the day, after the presidents and press had gone. The law was still out in abundance, but tension was low. Even the firefighters congregating around FDNY’s Ten House mostly shared smiles and laughs.

But not everyone. A closer look among the surrounding thousands could still identify plenty of wounded.

A somber firefighter in dress blues, alone, apart from the others—by his uniform from California (and not the only one I saw from there).

A young couple in a long, weeping embrace, her unable to lift her head from his shoulder.

A devout Muslim couple, paying quiet respects in tunic and hijab.

Sad faces attached to sad fingers traced names they’d known among the ill-fated thousands remembered on those big marble squares.

The widowed, the orphaned, the bereft. The pensive, the stone-faced, the teary. The proud and patriotic and pissed off. So much sadness still lives here.

But the neighborhood is changing too. The new money is less refined.

Souvenir vendors hawked gewgaws. Truthers ranted under Inside Job signs. Antivaxxers squealed for attention. One poster: The COVID Vaccine Is 9/11 in a Jab. Never let an opportunity go to waste, I guess.

I was surprised by a strong urge to tell these people off, but there’s not much point to contesting human nature. Opportunism inevitably follows tragedy. Reverence yields to irreverence. Time degrades and defames. In 2014 the 9/11 Memorial Museum itself got dragged for selling a commemorative cheese plate.

It’s nothing unique to this event or place. You can buy cheap tchotchkes at Pearl Harbor. Kids pull goofy Instagram faces at Auschwitz. There’s a picture of young me on a trip to Belgium next to a guillotine with shirt collar pulled up over my head, jokingly headless. Ugly American, yeah, but it was a long time ago and not my daddy decapitated.  

Hurt heals, life goes on. History’s most indelible moments become, at last, things of profit and punchline.

Zoom back for a second. Commercialization isn’t a bad thing—just capitalism in action. Nothing is more human, or certainly more American, than entrepreneurial spirit, scuffling to better your station by selling people things they want. A lot of people want to feel connections to important places and events. That’s not wrong. In a way sales of tacky merchandise help connect us. (They also sustain a lot of museums and fund a lot of education.)

We all have our ways to cope and our parts in the healing. If a Ground Zero ballcap helps its wearer process history or its seller feed their kids, humanitarians and healers should be OK with that.

At least in theory. But 9/11 playing cards still feel trivializing.

As generations pass, the creeping irreverence becomes easier to accept. Today it’s still a little difficult. If you lost colleagues and friends, were rewarded with horrible sickness for working the pile, or just thought Damn, that could have been me, you might feel the same.

Sorry, Belgians.

John Erich is the senior editor of EMS World.