Delayed Damage from 09/11



Yahoo has a Reuters news story about the large number of emergency workers who are going to be retiring on breathing related disabilities caused by the dust kicked up by the WTC collapse. Unsurprisingly, there has been a dramatic increase in stress-related problems among emergency workers as well. While stress-related psychiatric disorders are among the easiest opportunities to scam the system, it isn't any great surprise that an event of this magnitude, and with so many friends and colleagues killed, would cause dramatic increases in such maladies.



More disturbing: "As many as 200,000 New York City children may have developed psychiatric problems after Sept. 11, according to a recent study by the New York Psychiatric Institute." Yeah, psychiatrists are looking for ways to scam some money out of the system, but I don't find it at all hard to believe that this event has done some real serious damage to a lot of impressionable kids--and not just in New York City.



Consider the damage that al Qaida has done to America: lives lost; children orphaned; spouses widowed; buildings destroyed; permanent disabilities; business records lost irrevocably; children traumatized. How many decades of capitalism would it take to produce this much injury? (Of course, capitalism would have also produced some benefits as well, as even the most hard leftists would grudgingly admit.) And yet the left is still running around looking for reasons to excuse al Qaida's actions.