To the Bottom Feeders
Context: I was a student at Stuyvesant High School on September 11th, 2001. That hellhole school has an exploitative approach to the tragedy. Last month, it asked alumni for submissions for its 25th anniversary art party. Here's what I sent:
To the bottom feeders, “FUCK YOU” is not enough to express my contempt.
For one thing, my dad was in the area and tried to take me to safety before the towers fell. You lied to him, saying we had already been evacuated to safety. You continued this lie for weeks or months, telling Seventeen Magazine you cared about students’ safety.
In truth, you evacuated us before, during, and after the second tower collapsed. While I was on the stairway, a teacher bragged about how this hellhole of a school was so valuable and important, it was going to be next. When I, a frightened fifteen year old, asked him to stop, he doubled down to brag about how amazing this hellhole is.
The evacuation lasted two to three blocks before we were all abandoned. So much for valuing your students, the ones who give you the reputation you’re so enamored of.
To the bottom feeders, you wasted no time using a national tragedy to bolster your vanity. You placed a plaque at your entrance proclaiming us heroes for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. You posted my essay expressing my disgust at the plaque without my knowledge, let alone permission. You rounded up several students to write a play about the national tragedy to gather attention to yourselves. That wasn’t enough. You established your own PR office, and asked students to design a new World Trade Center to gather even more publicity.
To the bottom feeders, you kept lying to us, well after we returned to your contaminated building. You said it was safe to return, yet kept air quality instruments everywhere in the school. Every day, my econ class got interrupted while a mystery adult tested the air in our classroom.
To the bottom feeders, September 11th, 2001 was not my most traumatic day at your hellhole. You made your hatred for me very clear when you first tried to prevent me from enrolling at your school. For four years, you have never forgiven me for being your student, and punished me every day I was matriculated there. For four years, you called me worthless and told me to die, so I’d stop contaminating your precious school with my existence.
But ten days after graduation, you sent me an envelope, asking me for my money. After four years of telling me a lifetime in a soggy cardboard box beneath an underpass was too good for the likes of me, you assumed that I had money to give, and would ever want to give it to you.
To the bottom feeders, count yourself lucky I bother gracing you with this essay.
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