That reminds me. I still have not finished reading the list of all the victims of that day. I must be done by tomorrow night.
I agreed with the point that the displaying of these things was/is "too soon". I also agreed with the poster that said these things need to be shown. I found it really disturbing that the news media at one point actually pretended it never happened. Just reinforces the false news we get every day. It happened. It is terrible but it happened. Should it be shown "live on TV", no.
If it had been my husband or brother would I have looked at the pictures. I can't say. My closest and best friend died this summer. Do I want to see pictures of her at the end? No.
Well, like I said, I found the article interesting in the fact it made me think on all these issues.
Don't sanitize the worst terrorist attack, and one of the single worst acts of mass murder in history. The hijackings were the most extreme form of brutality and inhumanity. Open your imagination to what those passengers experienced as they helplessly watched the planes they were on fly closer and closer to those buildings. Try to feel what those 100+ story falls must have been like. Think of the immense bravery of those on Flight 93 who chose to fight back.
The events of that day were bloody, feiry, gory, horrific, and all of the other adjectives that try, but fail to convey the truth we all MUST know if we are to prevent such acts in the future. If we are to find any meaning whatsoever in the deaths of all those people.
No, don't hide the truth from us. Only the images can tell the truth. Words are puny substitutes. I want to see because I believe I owe it both to those who died and those who might yet be victims if I pretend that 9/11 was really just another event in the passing parade.
We should think about this, and get angry all over again, every day.
THEY BEGAN JUMPING NOT LONG after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building's fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors—the top. For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds. They were all, obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, one prays, in soul. One hit a fireman on the ground and killed him; the fireman's body was anointed by Father Mychal Judge, whose own death, shortly thereafter, was embraced as an example of martyrdom after the photograph—the redemptive tableau—of firefighters carrying his body from the rubble made its way around the world.
From the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center resisted redemption. They were called "jumpers" or "the jumpers," as though they represented a new lemminglike class. The trial that hundreds endured in the building and then in the air became its own kind of trial for the thousands watching them from the ground. No one ever got used to it; no one who saw it wished to see it again, although, of course, many saw it again. Each jumper, no matter how many there were, brought fresh horror, elicited shock, tested the spirit, struck a lasting blow. Those tumbling through the air remained, by all accounts, eerily silent; those on the ground screamed. It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, "We're in uncharted waters now." It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted a woman to wail, "God! Save their souls! They're jumping! Oh, please God! Save their souls!" And it was, at last, the sight of the jumpers that provided the corrective to those who insisted on saying that what they were witnessing was "like a movie," for this was an ending as unimaginable as it was unbearable: Americans responding to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world with acts of heroism, with acts of sacrifice, with acts of generosity, with acts of martyrdom, and, by terrible necessity, with one prolonged act of—if these words can be applied to mass murder—mass suicide.
I live in New Jersey and was warned to avoid going up to work in North Jersey that day by my wife, who was already in the office. I watched the local coverage and before they knew how bad it would be, they were showing close ups of people clinging to the outside of the building waving their jackets and such for help, and trying to climb out of the windows. That stopped, I think, when they realized that there was no hope for those people. It was pretty terrible, though maybe not as terrible as the realization that the first tower had collapsed as I saw CitiCorp tower peeking through the debris when it should have been obscured by the South Tower. It is so clean to everyone now what happened but at the time, given the news camera angles and the disbelief over a total collapse, it was not so clear until I saw no building where a building should have been.
A friend who works only two blocks away who has an office that overlooked the WTC saw the first plane hit out of the corner of his eye. He once mentioned looking at the burning tower with binoculars and regretting it. He didn't mention any details about what he saw and I didn't push for them based on the sound of his voice on the phone.
There is a legal doctrine called depraved heart murder. When a kidnapper is so depraved as to torture his victim to the point where death becomes preferable to continuted agony, the kidnapper is legally responsible for the death as a homicide. That is what happened here - the jumpers were murdered as surely as those who died in the towers.
Never, never, never forget.
This was something that even as we were watching was not being shown to us. When I think of 9/11, the images of the towers coming down is very clear, but I only remember one image of a body falling. It was shown early after the planes struck on Fox News and the commentator (was it David Asman?) said something to the effect of "were we supposed to show that?" I wish we had seen more- only for the purpose of keeping our fighting spirit alive.