This has been posted before, and I didn't buy it then either.

At this point, recognizing that I had truly arrived in hell, I was moved to utter in his presence, possibly for his benefit, that "Hey, if I had somebody in this mess, I'd be pissed as shit, and yeh, I'd wanna get those motherfuckers", at which point he put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, "Hey, it's not about that."



"You wanna know something" drawing near to my ear, "Bush and Bin laden have the same banker."

And even though I was stunned by his grasp of current events (another fireman would later advise me that the whole situation was one of "rich people fighting over oil with all of us caught in the middle") what I came to recognize slowly was that the message of these men and women who were rubbing shoulders with the dead 24/7 was quite at odds with the then prevailing ethic, and that was that it made no human sense to inflict what was in front of us on anyone else.



"Hey, it's not about that. Bush and Bin Laden have the same banker." Does this really sound like something one of these blue-collar firemen would have said? Or is it a bit of embellishment, to use a kind term, to make a political point?

Maybe Morales was down there, and maybe he saw the destruction. But if a New York fireman working Ground Zero said anything about "rich people fighting over oil" I'll eat my hat.