PhotoDude.com

Sat. Sep 11, 2004

Three Years On

Two years ago, I wrote, “You shouldn’t be here today. I didn’t lose a loved one on September 11, 2001. None of my relatives gave their life in military service to their country in Afghanistan. I was just another shell shocked American watching from a safe distance wrapped in the comfort and safety of their home [...] But today, there is nothing I can say that is relevant, except, you shouldn’t be here right now. Go pray, meditate, take a thoughtful walk, or partake of the far more pertinent memorials offered today in various places, in various ways. You shouldn’t be here.”

The raw hole from 9/11/2001 still gaped on 9/11/2002, both the real one in lower Manhattan, and the psychic one that marked so many of us. Two years later, three years removed from the tragedy itself, we are not so raw.

For some, that’s a good thing. The rawest among us that day, those who suffered the loss of a loved one, deserve much more than whatever small measure of healing they’ve been able to muster in these three years. Because they have so much further to go than the rest of us.

For others, who surely watched from afar (like me), they have moved on so well they can comfortably use 9/11 as a political football in this ugly season, without a trace of remorse, or seemingly even realization of what they do. But today’s not the day for that, either.

The media has moved on in many ways, too. The infamous images of that day have been reduced to the visual equivalent of a “sound byte.” A half second of a speeding jet followed by two seconds of fireball. Three seconds of the South Tower collapsing. Four seconds of people walking out of a smoky hell, covered in ash. All used as visual background while the 10 second voiceover talks about the latest from the 9/11 Commission, or the latest audiotape from Osama, or the new Orange alert, etc., etc.

Last year, I wrote “Mad at the Messenger” about the highly volatile and mixed views about the publication of photos of people who jumped from the WTC. It was inspired by the article “The Falling Man” in Esquire. I stumbled across that article again a few weeks back, and one section struck me. Perhaps because it seemed to partially express my impressions of the way most of us have “moved on.”

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.

But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen.

Tom Junod: “The Falling Man”

But “The Falling Man” is not the only Unknown Soldier. Nearly half of those killed in Manhattan are “Unknown,” in that they left not a trace of identifiable remains. They were not only murdered, they were physically expunged. We shouldn’t hold those horrible thoughts and images close to our heart any longer than necessary, not three years on, but we also shouldn’t try to erase them from our brains.

Especially today. We all have to move on, in our own time, in our own way. But we should never forget the unprecedented violence visited on thousands of innocents on 9/11, many of them literally wiped from the face of the Earth.

Especially today.