The Survivors Announcement
Delivered by Brian Jaffee to the Washington press corps and several political leaders, on behalf of some of The Survivors. The speech was broadcast live by the 24-hour news networks and picked up by the other networks as part of the nightly cycle.
On September the eleventh, two-thousand and one, a group of men with a sad, foolish hatred in their breasts seized control of five airplanes and stabbed them into America’s heart. On that terrible day this nation lost the lives of so many of the men and women that made it great and in the past four years you have doubtless heard their stories so many times. You have heard the stories of the four-hundred and three fire fighters, paramedics and police officers who rushed into the Twin Towers and laid down their own lives, in the hope that they might save others. You have heard the story of the two thousand and sixteen civilian employees at the World Trade Center who struggled desperately to find their way out of a collapsing, fiery wreck, without success. You have heard the story of the two-hundred and sixty eight men, women and children who rode four of those airplanes to an unwilling and horrid destination.
But you have not heard, not yet, the true story of the fifth plane, the plane that went down in New Jersey, the plane whose number of passengers exceeded the number of people on all of the other four flights combined. You have not heard how we struggled hard, with all the righteous courage that any son or daughter of America could call their own, against the terrorists who held our lives in their grip; how, unarmed, we threw ourselves against men with guns and knives and bombs. You have not heard how, though we lost four of our fellows, we ultimately triumphed and re-took control of the plane. You have not heard that our success was short-lived as our plane rocked with the shock of impact and our world went black. And you have not heard that we woke up, very much alive, four years later.
Of the two-hundred and seventy seven passengers and crew of American Airlines flight two eighty three, everyone who was alive when the plane went down was alive to wake up four days ago. Two-hundred and seventy three men, women and children lived through that tragedy. I and the ladies and gentlemen who stand with me on this stage tonight are just some of the survivors.
To our families and our friends I can say that we love you and we’ll come to you as soon as we can. But right now, there’s so much that’s happened in the world in the past four years that’s lost to us, a history of events that we’re only just starting to put together. We woke up just days ago to a world that thought us dead and this has been difficult for us to come to terms with. We have, in so many, many ways, woken up to a different world than the one we left.
And it’s a world that, I think, is about to become far more different. When we survivors woke up from our four-year sleep, we woke up changed; any injuries or illnesses we might have had were gone, the minor physical deficiencies, like a need for glasses or a weak heart, we were cured of those, too. It’s a strange new world.
Once we’ve understood how we’ve changed, who knows what we can’t do together? Can we cure cancer? AIDS? MS, Parkinson’s? I’d like to find out. But I just don’t know.
And there’s so much about this world that we just don’t know. We don’t know what took our plane down. We don’t know how or why we have blessed enough to survive. We don’t yet know the depths of the changes that we have undergone. What we do know is that we were not alone in the darkness of our slumber. We were not unknown bodies in darkened caves. Rather we were sleeping dolls in the cold-armed embrace of a company named Celera. They could have told you that we were alive. They could have told our families and saved them so much heartache.
Instead, they kept it secret and turned us from human beings into laboratory rats. Like thieves in the night they stole from our unconscious, unwilling selves. For four long years they took from us our most personal of possessions. They took our hair, our skin; they took the very blood from out of our veins.
If this theft was for our benefit, then maybe we could forgive Celera this horrible violation of our most private selves, but they took this blood and mixed it with toxins, with disease. They took our cells and tried to clone them. I have here a history of their experiments on us over the past four years, enough for all of you to see for yourselves what they did. You’ll notice, too, something peculiar in these files: there’s no evidence of brainwave patterns matching comas. In other words, there’s nothing to tell us why we slept for as long as we did. It’s possible, just possible, that Celera is responsible for that.
Certainly when we woke up they denied us all contact with the outside world. They wouldn’t let us call the people we love and tell you that we were alive. They wouldn’t give us newspapers or televisions so that we could see for ourselves how the world had changed. At points, they locked us in our rooms and kept us in their facility through threat of force.
As you can see, not all of my fellow survivors are here behind me right now. So many of them have fled, I can only assume in horror over what’s been done to them. I hope you’ll excuse me for just a minute while I address them directly. After you’ve had time to process everything that’s happened to you, after you’ve calmed down, after you’ve had time to get in touch with your families, I hope that you’ll come back to us. We have so much to talk about. I was told just before I came up on stage that one of us died last night, from some form of heart failure. We don’t know yet if it was a personal problem of his or something that might affect all of us. I’d like to keep as many of us alive as I can, and the government’s already offered to help us with that. Just remember: you don’t have to be alone.
With so many gone, with so many of their opinions unknown to me, I cannot claim to speak for all of the survivors. But I can say with confidence that I and the brave men and women who stand with me right now have questions that we want answered. We want to know how our plane was hijacked. We want to know how we survived its crash. We want to know what’s happened to us in the past four years.
We survivors, these heroes, have suffered the cruelest of indignities. We have been tortured in a way that no American should ever have to suffer through. I believe that what happened to us is not worthy of the sacrifice we were willing to make. I believe that what happened to us is not worthy of the American people. Americans are better than that. Americans do not let their fellows fall when they could have easily picked them up. I ask you, the people of these United States, not to let us survivors fall. Please show us that you support our decision to turn away from the company that has abused us for the past four years and turn instead to someone who can treat us fairly and with the dignity we deserve, to someone who will respect our most basic human rights. Please show us that you are not willing to let injustice bloom in the heart of this great nation. Please raise your voices high and welcome us back into the loving embrace of our country.
