CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

ARCHIVES!
America's Trouble Remembering the World Trade Center Jumpers

Friday, June 17, 2005

this entry brought to you by nine inch nails, "everyday is the same"


I was reading an article about 9/11 a few weeks ago, in particular about the jumpers. I remembered the jumpers. I think it's perhaps the most horrifying aspect of 9/11-- the jumpers. And then the realization of what would happen to a person if they happened to get under a jumper, what would happen to a fireman trying to rush into this building just hours before it collapsed, if someone fell on top of them. The bodies didn't just fall here and there. They streamed. Four and five at a time. Four or five immediately afterward.

And then, in the ensuing chaos and the media coverage, it stopped. Or rather, the media just stopped showing it. Just like that. Something about people's natural reaction to one of the most horrible acts in American history was just too shameful. Too embarassing. We can't show that. We can show everything but that. For those people's sakes. For the family's sake.

I didn't realize what it meant at the time, because I was so overwhelmed with everything. I did notice that the footage was missing, but I quickly put it to the back of my head, because I was trying to make sense of everything. But reading the article made me very deeply, profoundly sad. Not neccesarily at the people who could not find another way out, but at the reaction that, somehow, this was not valid. Somehow, these people's deaths just didn't happen. The fact that they died happened; you know tht because they had been compiled into numbers. But how they died ceased to have ever happened. Their individual acts had been negated and compiled into incomprehensible data.

The artcile mentioned an artist who took a picture of his friend laying on the floor and made a sculpture of it called "tumbling woman", and it was banned from New York art galleries because it was said to be distasteful. I remember reading about this artist at the time, and thinking, wow, it's amazing what some jackasses will do for attention. But when I read his side of the story now, years after the horror of that day, it made me feel bad that I'd ever thought this way, and I'd felt angry that whatever newslink I'd read it on completely misconstrued what was really happening. What was so invalid about an artist trying to express his horror at what was happening? Isn't that we all were doing? The artist did not actually depict any single jumper in his sculpture-- it was his friend. It wasn't the art that people wanted to ignore, it was the fact that this ever happened that they wanted to ignore. But why?

During World War II, once the Americans breached the German concentration camps, Life magazine and other publications printed the most horrible, frightening photos of humanity, and the pictures we printed as quickly as they could be, essentially as they were happening. The prisoners barely looked human; depraved of food and shelter and anything resembling human rights. They were often shown naked, because this is how they were found. No one hesitated in printing them using the "out of respect to the families" excuse because this was history in the making. We needed to know what was happening, we needed to know everything, so it wouldn't happen again. In Vietnam the country saw horrible pictures of families and children, naked, scattering from the horrors of napalm. We saw these pictures and we were horrified, but they happened.

I don't need to know who the people that jumped were. I don't need to know their names. But to ignore that there were people that jumped seems, to me anyway, more disrespectful to the families than showing that they did. Ignoring such a horrific part of what happened that day seems counter-productive. I don't see how the nation could be deemed ready to handle the repeated footage of that day shown for years, but not ready to see certain aspects of it. Making 9/11 cuddlier and easier to swallow seems pretty offensive, doesn't it?

The article went on to detail a particular jumper in a particular photograph, and one man's job to find out who this jumper was. He had it narrowed down to a single family. When he approached the possible daughter and showed her the picture of the falling man, her response was "That piece of shit is not my father."

What I don't think I understand, what I think bothers me the most is that, somehow, America has found this very human reaction to something of this magnitude invalid. I don't get how we as Americans have somehow chosen to judge those poor souls, their eyes watering, their smoke-filled lungs gasping for one last breath of air, their mind trying to do anything to get away from this horror, and somehow, this is invalid. Obviously, I don't think most of us outright think they're "pieces of shit", but by collectively ignoring that it ever happened, I feel like it's effectively making those last moments of their life meaningless and without merit.

For all the comments and observations that America lost its innocence that day, we sure seem so much more willing to close our eyes to things we don't want to see.
-----



with love from CRS @ 3:45 PM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment