Of all the bad, crazy, horrifying things that happened during (and as a consequence of) the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 the thing that froze my soul and has stayed with me to this day is something we still only whisper about: the Jumpers. Remember them? People no different from you or me forced into a choice beyond imagining: trapped in burning building far above the ground, do I stay here and burn alive or do I jump and fall to my death? The utter cruelty of that no-win dilemma-- the sheer animal panic of choosing one death to escape another that is bearing down fast upon you-- sends the mind fleeing from reason.
That September morning nearly a decade ago wasn't the first time I'd tried to imagine that unimaginable choice. Earlier that same year was the first time I'd read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (.pdf here). In it, Zinn tells the story of another group of New Yorkers forced to make the choice no one should ever have to make:
On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that began in a rag bin swept through the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, too high for fire ladders to reach. The fire chief of New York had said that his ladders could reach only to the seventh floor. But half of New York's 500,000 workers spent all day, perhaps twelve hours, above the seventh floor. The laws said factory doors had to open outward. But at the Triangle Company the doors opened in. The law said the doors could not be locked during working hours, but at the Triangle Company doors were usually locked so the company could keep track of the employees. And so, trapped, the young women were burned to death at their work-tables, or jammed against the locked exit door, or leaped to their deaths down the elevator shafts. The New York World reported:
.. . screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly fact that on both the Grcene Street and Washington Place sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying. .. .
From opposite windows spectators saw again and again pitiable companionships formed in the instant of death- girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped.
When it was over, 146 Triangle workers, mostly women, were burned or crushed to death. There was a memorial parade down Broadway, and 100,000 marched.
When we think of evil we tend to think of spectacular one-offs; acts of intentional murder like 9/11/2001. But there is another kind of evil, nearly invisible in its banality, which calculates human value only as a function of a person's contribution to the material bottom line; an evil which treats those who do the thankless jobs as disposable commodities; an evil that must and will always lead to the terrible choice those women and men faced at Triangle because replacing an injured or dead worker with another desperate soul is always cheaper than making sure everyone has a safe place to work.
3/25 changed everything. Due in large part to the public's outcry over the senseless loss of life in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, unions were formed and worker safety laws were passed to ensure that no one ever again had to make those terrible choices. It took years, much hard work, and many more senseless deaths, but we drove back that banal evil to create a country where a decent, humane working environment is more the rule than the exception and where even the lowest paid worker has someone on their side. And now, 100 years on, those who would have no doubt locked the doors on the 7th floor back then are singing from the same songbook their fathers were before that terrible day: Unions are lazy thugs who want too much, worker safety laws are an intolerable intrusion by Big Government, treating workers decently is just too high a price to pay.
To them I say, we shall not go back.