I spent part of yesterday looking through everyone’s Facebook posts. I was determined not to be bogged down into the nostalgia and overly dramatized remembrance of 2001.
Passing from page to page, each with a picture from the events that transpired 18 years ago, I slowed but did not stop. Then, there wasn’t one. A page, an update, a post without any mention of the day, as if it had not happened. I did judge. Then I paused. I paused because from the perspective of this person, that day, may not have had the impact that it had for me. Maybe from that vantage their last 18 years have helped replace whatever pain felt then with other things—life. Moments later, I forgave the offending post, and even myself for the judgement.
After this, I slowed down as I passed pictures and statements. (Reminder, most of my friends have participated in the events post September 11th, and they revel in the ability to lavish praise on those likeminded individuals.) Though I am one of them, I would like to believe that I am more tempered—arrogance assuredly pushing back against the normative. It was then that I found a most interesting article. A humanizing piece about the “Falling Man” picture.
The story is fascinating in both its detail and yet its scope. A balance that keeps you the reader coming to and from—much like the description of the man (of many) who tumbled without control to his end. The story takes the arc of the picture itself alongside the arc of the search to find the man in the picture. Strikingly, the humanity of it all seems to get lost. I found in fact that only the mortician was able to understand that those who left the building by entering the void had no choice. They did not jump, they were forced, pushed, compelled in their desire to live that the other options were not available.
More posts down the page there was a picture of a thin-blonde woman in a flight suite. Her Air Force call sign “Lucky” was clearly derived from her last name, Penny. This fighter pilot was the first person in the air headed out towards flight 93. Loaded with only dummy training rounds she was asked to defend the National Capital Region Airspace. Her commanders wouldn’t tell her how to do her job knowing that they would be asking her to commit suicide. Instead, they left the choices up to her and another pilot who took off at the same time. Their plan, if you could call it a plan, was to strike the cockpit and the tail of the plane simultaneously to down the aircraft.
“I genuinely believed that it was going to be the last time I took off. If we did it right, this would be it.”
She would later, over ten years later, say that her heroes were those passengers on Flight 93 that thought to themselves that there are some things more important their lives. Such statements are so hard to internalize, to understand, to comprehend—really. The meta-ethical choices presented to the passengers, and then the same to “Lucky,” can paint a confusing picture of what we owe ourselves, let alone our State. Did she elevate the status of the passengers to offset the relief of not having to sacrifice her life, and making the choice to sacrifice the life of the passengers? I know that out of respect I will never ask her that question.
Though, just shy of falling into the questions raised, I found myself pondering about the social contract that we do live by. Alternatively, what is more important than our individual existence? Can we be of two minds at the same time with regards to the importance or primacy of our individual claims to this existence? I do not know, though I have not spent much time thinking about. Moreover, way leads onto way, and the river continues to flow.
18 years later the acts committed in the name of nihilism (or change if you are slightly less daring) bring about sharp images forever burned into our minds. And in these images, and the actions taken, you can find all of the conflict (both the greater Jihad—inside all of us, and the lesser Jihad—committed that day by 11 mass murders), all of the heroes (chosen or unchosen, and even compulsorily), and all of the emotions that come from such depths. The void those men and women found themselves in as they exited the side of a great tower was as immeasurable as the depths from which our response came from. Even now, the world can feel the response of the sleeping giant. So much so that we do not yet characterize it as the response to an event.
I wonder where we, or the world, will land when we stop tumbling through the void.
Anonymous Africanus 