“In some ways the fight over 9/11 health care was the subtext of the whole Daily Show, the whole 16 years that I was there,” Stewart says. Because as much as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, exposed the giant flaws in the American national security system, the treatment of those damaged by the attacks laid bare this country’s broken political system-one that is too often incapable of taking commonsense steps to reduce gun violence, or tackle climate change, or fight a pandemic. Yet the fact that a John Feal needed to exist to ensure that the right thing got done-that is an outrage and an embarrassment, with no end in sight.
As with most myths and movies, the full story is more complicated, and there are dozens of players who deserve credit for delivering the money and care needed by 9/11’s survivors: Legislative aides and lawyers and doctors and labor union leaders and even a few Republicans and journalists. John Feal goes to Washington: It’s an inspiring story, the kind that myths and movies are made of. Like an exorcism.” He sighs, and laughs, because he knows the fight still isn’t done. Feal stood in the hallway outside the Senate chamber and sobbed for two solid minutes. After this vote everything seemed to hit him at once. Over the years Feal had paid for more than a dozen funerals he’d donated one of his kidneys to raise awareness about the need for organ transplants among first responders. A baseball hat was clamped firmly on his bald head a pair of black sunglasses was perched on the hat’s rim. He was wearing an open-necked polo, its short sleeves good and tight, the better to show off bulging biceps and forearms tattooed in a raucous swirl of Gaelic symbols and a red, white, and blue Captain America.
“Well, I’m here to make sure that you don’t.”Īs the crowd rose to applaud, a muscular man sitting behind Alvarez leaned forward and whispered into the ear of the next speaker, Jon Stewart. “You all said you would never forget,” Alvarez said, his voice raspy.
He was weak, hooked up to a chemo pump, yet Alvarez had traveled from New York to Washington for a congressional hearing, to plead with politicians not to let other first responders suffer. Really, though, Alvarez was the victim of the three months he’d spent searching Ground Zero for casualties of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. He’d been a buff NYPD bomb squad detective now he was a 110-pound bag of bones, the victim of colorectal cancer.
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