My grandparents’ generation could remember where they were when they heard about the Pearl Harbor attacks. For my parents’ the defining tragedy was Kennedy’s assassination. My generation’s shocking tragedy is the September 11th attacks. On that morning, I was sick with some devilish flu, in a Nyquil daze. Even for people not engulfed in a feverish drugged state, the attacks seemed unreal. Unfortunately, they were real. Let’s hope that your generation only has the COVID, with it’s 180,000 deaths as its traumatic event.
I remember watching the news and seeing a business man in a long-sleeved shirt and tie trying to lean out of a window in one of the towers to escape the smoke and flame. He edged further and further out of the window, attempting to brace his body between the tower’s ridges. He soon fell. I’ve never seen that footage since. There have been many, many documentaries and television programs covering the 9/11 attacks, yet I’ve never seen that particular footage again. And that’s a shame–we shouldn’t hide that footage. We shouldn’t revel in it, either, but it’s a representation of the horror and the incredible tragedy of that day.
Tom Junod, writing in Esquire discusses this image and how we remember 9/11. His article is titled “The Falling Man: An Unforgettable Story.” I’ve posted an excerpt below and the URL to the article. You want to remember 9/11 and honor the victims, the dead? Read it. Remember.
“In fact, they did, at least in photographic form, and the pictures that came out of the death camps of Europe were treated as essential acts of witness, without particular regard to the sensitivities of those who appeared in them or the surviving families of the dead. They were shown, as Richard Drew’s photographs of the freshly assassinated Robert Kennedy were shown. They were shown, as the photographs of Ethel Kennedy pleading with photographers not to take photographs were shown. They were shown as the photograph of the little Vietnamese girl running naked after a napalm attack was shown. They were shown as the photograph of Father Mychal Judge, graphically and unmistakably dead, was shown, and accepted as a kind of testament. They were shown as everything is shown, for, like the lens of a camera, history is a force that does not discriminate. What distinguishes the pictures of the jumpers from the pictures that have come before is that we—we Americans—are being asked to discriminate on their behalf. What distinguishes them, historically, is that we, as patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at them. Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness—because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.“
h/t to Andrew Donaldson at Ordinary Times for reminding me of this article and inspiring this post.
