It's not just their politics which bug me, but how they've been trying to exert influence and dominate public policy and decisions, based on nothing but their victim status.
Yes, I'm sorry for their losses, but no way does that entitle them to demand that lower Manhattan essentially be turned into a necropolis on which nothing can ever again be built.
Never have a neurotic, meglomanic few ever so placed their obsessions on the tragedy of many.
The venerable status accorded this group of widows comes as no surprise given our times, an age quick to confer both celebrity and authority on those who have suffered.
She has put in words something that has bugged me for a long time ... long before the attacks on 9/11 ... that I couldn't quite verbalize.
Why have some in our society decided that certain people, simply because they have suffered a traumatic loss, are authorities on anything about which they choose to speak? All of us have dealt with tragedy in our lives in one form or another. But that doesn't make us special ... it simply means that we are part of the human race.
The media, in elevating these people to super-star status, does not only them a great dis-service (actually using them for ratings and financial gain) but helps to break down the moral fiber of our nation.
I can't help but think of the pioneer women who would see half of their families wiped out by an epidemic or killed by Indians (excuse me, native Americans) and yet they had to keep on trudging. They had to keep the fields tilled, the clothes washed, water hauled from the river ... they had to continue to work if they wanted to continue to live. They didn't have the luxury of becoming victims in perpetuity. They buried their dead and grieved as they carried on with their lives.
The softness of a nation that celebrates professional victims causes me great concern.
/rant