Remember how hard it was to accept what happened on 9/11? - The Dallas Morning News

suitersa.blogspot.com

This column is part of an opinion project commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11: We are living in a 9/12 world.

Eight Septembers ago, I found myself watching 9/11 all over again. As it did every year on this anniversary until 2017, MSNBC replayed coverage from that morning as if the nightmare was unfolding anew.

I hadn’t meant to watch. I stumbled onto the broadcast. But then I couldn’t turn it off. I was back in 2001, staring in disbelief, praying for mercy.

What struck me in 2013, though, was the broadcasters’ reactions. The footage was from NBC’s Today show. Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer relayed reports as they came in from the field and watched live video, along with the rest of the world, of the smoking twin towers.

And then the first tower fell.

I knew it was coming, of course, but I gasped, an involuntary human reaction to witnessing catastrophic loss of life. I thought, as we all have many times over the years, of the people in that building and their final seconds.

And then I realized the difference between my reaction and the broadcasters’. They hadn’t reacted at all.

You would think that, upon seeing this history-changing event for the first time, their reaction would have been dramatic. Tears, anger, prayer, a moment of silence for the lives we just saw extinguished. But none of that happened.

The tower fell while Katie was mid-sentence, recapping an earlier report about a low-flying aircraft in Washington DC. She just kept talking. Matt had to interrupt her a few seconds later with these words:

“Let’s go back. We just saw a live picture of what seemed to be a portion of the building falling away.”

Obviously, it was more than that. The footage is clear. Where once stood a building, there is now blue sky. And yet, Tom Brokaw, NBC’s top journalist, doesn’t utter the word “collapse” for another nine minutes.

Below are some excerpts from the broadcast. Keep in mind, each of these quotes comes after these journalists had watched the tower disappear.

9:59 a.m.

Tom: “Looks like a big chunk of it has just peeled away.”

10 a.m.

Tom: “This will have an enormous structural effect. Those buildings, I think it’s fair to say, will probably have to be brought down. It’s too early to speculate on that, but there’s been that kind of damage.”

10:01 a.m.

Matt: “This footage we’re seeing right now shows that the damage is so severe. We had seen what seemed to be two fairly self-contained impact craters before, and now it appears something much more dramatic has happened to at least one of those towers.”

10:01 a.m.

Katie: “These pictures are beyond belief.”

10:06 a.m.

Matt: “Let’s go back to a few seconds ago. This is now about an hour after the first impact. We saw some dramatic footage of a portion of one of the twin towers — actually — it appearing to fall away from the rest of the building. Can we go to the tape now? Here we go. Right here. This is — I mean when you look at it, that building has collapsed. That tower just came down.”

10:08 a.m.

Tom Brokaw uses the word “collapse.”

Tom, Matt, and Katie are smart people, and they were seeing the same images we all saw. The tower collapsed, plain as day. But it took them several minutes to name the truth because it was more than concrete and steel that collapsed on Sept. 11.

At 9:59 a.m. that day, order fell into chaos, certainty into doubt, security into exposure, confidence into fear. A collapse that colossal is hard to take in.

Now, 20 years later, Tom, Matt, and Katie’s reactions seem peculiar. We know the towers fell. In fact, we have a hard time remembering our world before they did. We forget that before 9:59 that morning, the idea of the entire World Trade Center disappearing in a massive cloud was utterly unimaginable.

It took nine minutes for Tom Brokaw to believe his eyes.

Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls such an event a “Black Swan.” According to his book by that name, a Black Swan is, “a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: it is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.”

In anticipation of this year’s anniversary, The Atlantic published a beautiful and haunting reminiscence of the grief of one family that lost a son, Bobby McIlvaine, on 9/11. Bobby didn’t work at the World Trade Center, but on Sept. 11, he met a colleague at Windows On the World to help set up for a conference he wasn’t even attending. What does it mean, in the grand, cosmic plan, that Bobby McIlvaine would have lived if the attack had happened on any other day? Or that Michael Lomonaco, the chef at Windows On the World, who would have normally been high in the North Tower by 8:30 a.m., stopped to get new eyeglasses on the way to work, and survived?

Every Black Swan is hard to believe. The 9/11 attacks, the JFK assassination, the moon landing, the Holocaust. You can still find people who deny that these happened, or who insist that their happening served some larger purpose, signified some arrangement beyond the actions of humans.

Bobby McIlvaine’s father has spent these 20 years diving into an internet-soaked fever dream that recasts the calamity as a plot point in a spy thriller. The attack was an inside job. The buildings collapsed because of bombs, not planes. The whole thing was a government intelligence cover-up. Even the name of the group that has championed those theories declares its desperation to build a reassuring order: Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Nothing offends like arbitrary suffering. We ask ourselves: “If this could happen, what else could happen? If this isn’t safe, what is?”

In 1963, Dallas was marked out for its own Black Swan. Almost 60 years after its dark shadow glided across Dealey Plaza, there are people who still refuse to comprehend it.

My dad was a high school freshman shop class when the principal made an announcement over the PA that Kennedy was assassinated. Everyone went home after that. School was canceled the next day.

Dad told me recently that the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone was hard for people to accept because no one wanted to accept it. People didn’t want to live in a world where a scrawny kid with no special training, no distinctive access, and no particular advantage could kill an American president.

“He was a nobody,” Dad said.

People couldn’t accept the cruel finality of JFK’s death in the months after the catastrophe any more than the first lady could accept it in those desperate, heart-wrenching moments when she tried to gather pieces of her husband off the back of the black Lincoln.

Katie Couric said it for us: “These pictures are beyond belief.”

It lacks the same gone-in-a-blink shock of 9/11 or 11/22/63, but we’re living through another Black Swan right now. Almost 5 million people have died from COVID-19, 614,000 of them Americans. And unlike those other two events, which brought Americans together in a surge of patriotism and interdependence, the current Black Swan has forced us apart both physically and ideologically.

Perhaps some of our separation can be explained by the all-too-human hesitation to name what is before us. How can something this bad and this random happen? Why are we facing it now? Whom can we blame? Where are we to go for answers?

It took Tom Brokaw nine minutes to grasp what had happened on 9/11. Twenty years on, Bobby McIlvaine’s father is still coming to grips. We all take these journeys at different speeds, and it’s essential that we give each other space to do so, because anything that changes everything is hard to believe.

Ryan Sanders is a member of The Dallas Morning News editorial board.

Adblock test (Why?)

"accept" - Google News
September 10, 2021 at 01:32PM
https://ift.tt/2VvTtEb

Remember how hard it was to accept what happened on 9/11? - The Dallas Morning News
"accept" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YsXkRf
https://ift.tt/3d2Wjnc

Bagikan Berita Ini