Another 9/11 Victim

Cesar Borja died of pulmonary fibrosis while his son was in Washington, at the invitation of Hillary Clinton, to attend the President's State of the Union address. At least 90 of those who worked at the World Trade Center site after 9/11 have now died as a result. These people are true heroes. Cesar Borja was a police officer who had been a paratrooper. He spent 16 hours a day working at the site, first to try to rescue anyone who might have been buried in the debris, then on the recovery effort, trying to help the city return to normal as rapidly as possible. The truth is one would personally have seen for oneself what conditions were like at the site to begin to understand how dangerous it was to even climb on and through that mountain of shifting debris.  The last thing anyone was seriously thinking about, especially at first, was being damaged by air pollution, considering how easy it would have been to be wounded or killed otherwise. There are literally thousands of people who worked there, and no telling how many were seriously injured by air pollution, or how many of those will die.

The drams of Cesar Borja's death, while waiting to receive a lung transplant, exactly at the time his son, Caesar Borja Jr., was attending the State of the Union address, has at least inspired local politicians to propose that a separate memorial be established to honor those who died, and will die in the future, because of their efforts after 9/11. I hope this is taken seriously and something comes of it. His son was at the address in the hope of making the point that continued funding for medical care for those injured in this way is urgently needed. The president needs to put this in the budget, and has not done so yet. He hasn't agreed to a meeting with Caesar Borja Jr. yet, either. I sincerely hope he will have the heart to at least speak in person to this lovely, grief-stricken young man who sacrificed being at his father's deathbed In the hope of helping all the others who are in the same position as his own family.