September 11, 2001
by
Sheila Maurer
How would we have reacted to the disaster on Tuesday, September 11th if we had not had T.V.? In the second World War, bombing raids, destruction of people and buildings were faithfully recorded on radio, but it was our imagination that had to make a picture of the devastation caused by warfare. Nothing that I could have imagined would have been even close to the actual nightmare seen on T.V. when the second plane streaked into the tower of the World Trade Building, engulfing the structure in flames and smoke.
I felt it couldn't really be happening — it was some war film trying to outdo any movie that had gone before. Every time, and that is often, that the same pictures are flashed onto the screen, I still find it beyond my realm of reason to accept such an event. Perhaps luckily, my mind draws a curtain over the imagined picture of those trapped in the two buildings, and the innocent air travellers living and breathing as their plane sped toward its goal, and then the penetration and, one hopes, instant death.
Will faithful, visual recordings of disasters make people come to their senses, or will one shut out the horror and wrap oneself in the flimsy blanket of disbelief and optimism: it can't happen to me?
Perhaps visual presentations will have some effect, or will they merely harden our sensitivity so that, as long as we are not in the melée, we can accept the fact that these things happen, but, thank God, not where we are?
