She's been coughin' since 9/11, she says.
But does anyone besides me think it's VERY ODD that NBC failed to mention that Kathryn Freed was City Councilman for that district on 9/11? And a community & environmental activist? I mean, she was featured on the national news, and they made her look like just another resident of the neighborhood, when she was actually part of Nadler's Ground Zero task force...
So much for her "influencing people to stay"...
Hell, I was there and I came back to my home 5 blocks from the WTC site -- and other than a few temporary sore throats and mild headaches, I have suffered no ill effects. Most people have not, and I question the motives of most who claim they have.
Among so many others, I had a supervisor at work who was complaining of headaches and other physical "trauma" about 3-4 months after the attacks. Of course, she was on W.57th Street when the WTC was attacked and she lives in the W. 70s.
Another group of whiners was those who tried to use the "bad air" to get an even bigger rent concession from our landlord. As it was, we got something like 10% off our rent for the rest of our leases. But that wasn't enough, since some greedy clymers found out that other buildings owned by the same company that were practically on top of the WTC site got 25% or 30%. Me? I thanked my lucky stars that my home was intact and that instead of overlooking a tragic disaster site, I still had my usual views and that I still had relatively normal subway service and didn't have to walk blocks and blocks out of my way to get a train. But these people were ballsy enough to demand a rent concession equal to what those who live right over the WTC site were getting. Some of the "activist" tenants here set up a Yahoo group, and it made for some rather entertaining reading -- the declarations of self-importance, the hysteria and the pseudo activism in babbling about a "rent strike" for no apparent reason other than the fact that some felt entitled to it.
My personal favorite (and it was hard to choose from all those great entries) was the kid who decided that he's "too important" and too "busy" to take any time off from his job to look for a new apartment, but since the air here was supposedly having a signficantly adverse effect on his health, he felt entitled to pay even less rent. My entertainment came to crashing end when I pointed out that if his health is really *that* bad, then no amount of money is worth compromising his health and that demanding a bigger rent concession isn't going to make his alleged health problems go away. That, and my pointing out that whatever air problems people felt existed weren't the fault of the owners kind of brought the activist movement to a screeching halt.
Exactly, I was just getting to that.