Dean's World

Here's a link to among the first of what will be many stories about the contents of the New York emergency 911 operator tapes recorded on September 11, 2001, finally being released.

They've redacted the voices of the victims, pleading for help, crying for their lives, anticipating horrible deaths. These victims were, perhaps, politically speaking, overinflated into "heroes." The real heroes were the police and firemen who ran into the face of danger to save these ordinary people. Passive, unchosen martyrdom is not, generally speaking, heroism. Perhaps that overstatement gave leave to the wicked likes of the boob flavor of the month from a year ago earning his putrid 15 minutes by declaring these ordinary but otherwise morally neutral victims to be, in fact, more than deserving of their fate.

Now we or our proxies can listen to the tapes and, without invading the dignity of the dead, still — by the reflection of their desperation in the voices of the 911 operators — let ourselves abandon the labels. We can reinvest these mothers, father, brothers and sisters with the humanity they were entitled to, and which was robbed of them by an act of religiously-motivated political mass murder.