During the recent presidential debate, Donald Trump held Kamala Harris responsible (as he did Joe Biden during the June 27 debate) for the tragedy of 13 soldiers dead in the hasty U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Morning came and so did Sept. 11, and a question comes to my mind: On that awful day 23 years ago, why did the U.S. military fail to protect 3,000 American lives and open skies, and, most amazingly, no heads rolled?

Indeed, why were there no national judgments for the military-civil leaders with a nearly trillion-dollar budget and the best fighting force in the world for failing their most fundamental duty? In other nations, such failures would make governments fall and many imprisoned and executed. (Our president got re-elected four years later).

But the ruling politicians were busy in another way: Immediately after the 9/11 attack, the government earmarked $7 billion for payment to the victims’ families, which eventuated as $2 million for each dead. Case is not closed pending more money.

Money “blood money” in lieu of death whitewashes many deaths in America even before the dead can bury their dead:

On June 17, 2015, nine people were killed and five injured at the AME Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Six years later, the DOJ announced $7.5 million for each victim, $5 million for each injured. Case closed.

Other well-known cases of monetized deaths: Sandy Hook Elementary School ($73 million). COVID deaths at the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, ($56 million). Breonna Taylor’s death by police raid ($12 million). George Floyd’s death by police violence ($28 million). Cases closed.

The list goes on all over America, and not a penny has gone to the dead.

Article continues after...

Yesterday's Most Read Articles

Nicotine pouch ban would hurt business, Athol convenience store owners say

Athol Chief Joseph Guarnera reflects on six years with Fire Department

With third location in Turners Falls, Community Health Center to serve another 4,000 patients

In address at UMass, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib cheers on those who faced consequences for supporting Palestine at flagship last spring

Ed board chair: Lawsuit anticipated in wake of MCAS vote

Thanksgiving football: Hot start more than enough to propel Athol past rival Mahar, 26-0 (PHOTOS)

Your Daily Puzzles

Cross|Word

Flipart

Typeshift

SpellTower

Really Bad Chess

Whenever deaths occur under unnatural circumstances in America, cash registers start ringing in lawyers’ offices. In our society, all unnatural deaths are monetized by unnatural cash. It’s our national sport. People die, survivors become rich, and death is forgotten, we return to our routines. Money payment, if large enough, mends even larger broken hearts, and America quickly forgets the dead and moves on to the next death money.

No other country makes such an intimate and rationally cold-blooded connection with money between the dead and the living, with money always being the bridge. Our collective guilt or apology seems to be too-easily resolved by this lure of money even before grief is registered in our minds.

Death and money — one “natural” and one “social” — are completely unconnected and unconnectable. Money cannot connect the dead and the living, and no one is either rich or poor at death.

Money, if paid to the living, however, pollutes human grief, which is neither caused by money nor amended by money. While we, the living, remember the dead with rituals, prayers and monuments, money payments easily overshadow reasons to remember the dead. In a case like 9/11, the nation might mourn, but there is nothing honorable or noble in the way families “fight each other” for the blood money, as one reporter described the scene. Human grief is only contaminated by inhuman money, by turning us instantly greedy and savage.

When orphans and widows are created out of breadwinners’ death, it’s the surviving community’s obligation to take care of them, but not to make them the newest-minted millionaires. When money is extracted from the wrongdoers as their punishment, it’s for the law to handle the process of crime and punishment, not accountants. Neither the welfare nor the punishment of the living justifies millions of dollars changing hands over someone’s death. Death requires grieving, not money-counting.

Thus justified by neither survivors’ welfare nor criminal justice, the dead souls never rest in peace while the living “fight each other” over money in between their grief and calculus. Surely, nothing purifies and redeems humanity like the grieving (and weeping) heart, while nothing is considered more vile and inhuman than those who profit on somebody’s death or sorrow.

In the Old World, unsurprisingly, lifelong grieving over the dead, via perpetual remembrance and reminder, is quite common. But in America, contrary to what Cody Delistraty says about grieving: “Large or small, if something is meaningful to you, take time to grieve its passing,” we encourage the widowed to go on the dating circuit as soon as the funeral is over. We don’t let the dead bury their dead in peace; nor do we allow the living to grieve the dead for very long,

In our money-mad society, where can we find pure grief wholly free from unnatural money? In desperation, we seek and find only one place where we may be free from our calculating heads and corrupting hearts. Where is such a place? The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Yes, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier which shames us — as a nation and as individuals — for our avarice and purifies our corruption.

There lies the unknown soldier who is so humble, so ordinary, so unsung, so everyman, that we don’t even know his name. In America, a nation that worships the rich and adores the famous, the Tomb is its most hallowed ground: There, the true hero, who died for his country without leaving his name, is honored and memorialized. So untouched by money and corruption, we remember the dead in perpetual grief, and, in doing so, redeem our own corrupt souls. There, our grief is pure and our remembrance from the heart, and no further.

Then, just around the corner, blood money beckons whenever an unnatural death occurs, in shameless hypocrisy and contradiction.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.