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Holocaust footage of starving bodies heaped in mountainous piles serves an important historical purpose. I don't know how you balance that with respecting the families and the obvious pain these images are going to cause. But I'm very much afraid that if we sterilize this event, make it as pretty and as innocuous as possible, we will have social disconnect and denial. I have this sad lost feeling that we NEED to know EXACTLY what was done to us. We need to see the wound, count the stitches, LOOK at it and come to grips with it rather than hide it neatly beneath some curtain of government censorship. I don't want to look at it. I really don't. But I know darn well that if we didn't have the visual evidence of what happened at Dachau, at Auschwitz, in Cambodia and all the places where humankind turned into demons capable of unspeakable acts, we will NOT keep in mind what the culprits really are. It will become to us some kind of vague accident, like any other explosion, crash, or fire. It is HARD ENOUGH to try to comprehend and believe in evil. Many liberals don't even TRY. If we shy away from the proof of it, we fall into the trap of being ready to excuse it. There will be nothing visceral to hold our attention and make our will to punish the culprits remain focused.

Without the PROOF would we be willing to accept that 6 Million Jews were exterminated in cruel conditions in Central Europe in the 1940s? Some people still deny that.

There will be nothing visceral to hold our attention and
make our will to punish the culprits remain focused.

Thank you for putting it into words. The necessity to
suspend the flash-bang allows the rage to subside. The
war against terrorism requires as much national will
as WWII, yet it has to be sustained with far less military
action. Having sterile crime scenes instead of
sites of mass death inhibits the chance of victory.

I see your point but for me the 'mere' pictures of the planes impacting and the subsequent collapse of the towers is sufficient. Nobody can see these pictures and not KNOW that there had to be enourmous casualties. To say that we need to see the wound and stiches, what do the pictures of people launching themselves out of the windows and the 16 day smoking crater at the WTC site mean? Additionally, from everything that I have heard, the size and intensity of the fire has made many of the victims part of the ash cloud with no bodies left to be gathered.

I fully agree with you that memories dim with time and that it is Extremely Hard to comprehend such Evil, but I say to you that this is no ordinary event. The shock of this is very properly compared to Pearl Harbor and JFK's Assassination, it is a Time-Shift event, where nothing is the same afterwards. I for one, as someone who loves planes and flying, will NEVER be able to forget the sight of a beautiful airplane being deliberately flown into the Tower 2.

Following this, I have no need to see each and every body bag. The police will have the coroner pictures and the DNA evidence for the trial and historians. I think you give too much credit to the 'revisionists' and their future successors. This is and will remain a fact and truth for the ages. That there will be disbelievers is also a fact but their versions will not be credible, body sacks or no body sacks.

P.S.: It looks like all posts are now automatically 'blockquoted'. I think that I like it.

I don't know how you balance that with respecting the families and the obvious pain these images are going to cause. But I'm very much afraid that if we sterilize this event, make it as pretty and as innocuous as possible, we will have social disconnect and denial

You want to put a face to this? Consider Barbara Olson for a moment. We all shudder to think of what happened to her, many thousands of us.

Multiply that by 7000 victims, and the countless people who knew each of them.

That isn't going to go away, it will NOT being sanitized. The horror of that day will be etched in our minds even completely than Kennedy, Challenger, etc. because millions of people throughout the country were touched personally by this in a way that exceeds the national tragedies I mentioned.

Rescue workers will remember, survivors will remember, WE will remember.

But I'm very much afraid that if we sterilize this event, make it as pretty and as innocuous as possible, we will have social disconnect and denial.

I agree 100%. Even as shocking as the news footage was, and the concept of as many as 15,000 dead, the human suffering never really hit me until I saw the latest issue of people and all the injured, horribly bloddy refugees.

No, we don't neeed to be bombarded with pictures on the 5:00 news, or magazine covers, but 1 picture of the scene would make a tremendous impact. Of, course, those who don't want to see, don't have to look. that whole 'responsibility for your own actions' thing, you know?

Holocaust footage of starving bodies heaped in mountainous piles serves an important historical purpose. I don't know how you balance that with respecting the families and the obvious pain these images are going to cause. But I'm very much afraid that if we sterilize this event, make it as pretty and as innocuous as possible, we will have social disconnect and denial. I have this sad lost feeling that we NEED to know EXACTLY what was done to us. We need to see the wound, count the stitches, LOOK at it and come to grips with it rather than hide it neatly beneath some curtain of government censorship. I don't want to look at it. I really don't. But I know darn well that if we didn't have the visual evidence of what happened at Dachau, at Auschwitz, in Cambodia and all the places where humankind turned into demons capable of unspeakable acts, we will NOT keep in mind what the culprits really are. It will become to us some kind of vague accident, like any other explosion, crash, or fire. It is HARD ENOUGH to try to comprehend and believe in evil. Many liberals don't even TRY. If we shy away from the proof of it, we fall into the trap of being ready to excuse it. There will be nothing visceral to hold our attention and make our will to punish the culprits remain focused.

Thank you -- I was going to post something similar, but you've said it better than I could.