Reflections on 9/11 Photos

Diana, my friend and neighbor across the street, forwarded to all on her email contact list some just released photos of the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. Fifty-seven slides. One in particular early on made me catch my breath. It was a small single falling person silhouetted against the large. plain, white background of the building.

The slides seem to go on and on. Views from overhead, from across the water with a small Statue of Liberty in the foreground, from ground level, from the north, the south, views of the initial impact and the flames, pictures and pictures and pictures of the clouds of pulverized debris, billowing like smoke, spreading out, spreading out, spreading out.

At first I was thinking that enough was enough. There are so many pictures, and they all told the same story. But then I began to feel the cumulative affect of the pictures.

What an audacious plan, to aim an airplane like a bullet, like an arrow, at the these incredibly tall buildings jutting up into the sky above New York, the economic center of a capitalist society whose god is money, with the buildings giving the finger to these fundamentalist Muslims. These men who planned and trained and coordinated with others, the other airplanes bent on their own destructive missions, to bring America to her knees while they go to the glory of their heaven.

But this isn’t the warfare of rules, the Geneva Convention and warrior fighting warrior. The people inside these buildings were office workers in their suits and ties and skirts and dresses. They’d kissed their husbands and wives and kids goodbye that morning and got on the commuter train and thought about work or what they were going to do that night or getting braces for Sarah or whether they should ask Mother to come live with them.

I have always been amazed that there are rules of war. Isn’t the saying “all’s fair in love and war”? These men believed that to be true. And the consequences of their action are being felt still in the Middle East and here at home as our warriors leave their homes and families to return, some damaged. And some not to return. As many, and more, than the number who died on 9/11.

August 1, 2009