Smoothing over the Horror - Is Sanitizing History Right?

Smoothing Over the Horror - Is Sanitizing History Right?

A man and a woman, holding hands, jumped from the eighty fourth floor of the World Trade Center in New York City, choosing to die on their own terms, rather than letting the smoke of the terrorist attack kill them, on the devastating day of September 11, 2001. They weren’t the only ones. One after the other, people jumped to their deaths from the building and joined the scattered bodies on the ground, lying in a pool of their own blood. Cameras in the vicinity – professional and on cell phones – captured the horrifying scene unfolding before them and the footage was played over and over on any and every news channel across the globe. The images on the screen disturbed the human mind, and reminded us once again of the cruelty that man possesses and can exercise over his fellow beings. The horror, the pain, the mayhem flashed before our eyes and got imprinted upon our minds for years to come.

The next day, the New York Times published a photograph of a man mid–air in his fall to death from the WTC North tower, and the story of ‘The Falling Man’ became an iconic but controversial image of the event (Junod).

By the day after, the concerned authorities declared the footage and some images to be too graphic for the people watching all over the world, and censored them from the media.

As more and more eye witness accounts came in, the pictures in our imagination became even more horrifying than they already were. The survivors told tales that changed our perception of what really happened, transcended it beyond what the media showed us, and made us wonder where these images that they spoke of, were. An account of a soldier revealed the bloodcurdling scenes of finding corpses buried under the debris, but in bits and pieces not enough to make three whole human beings (Foldenauer). There were unnamed accounts that talked of the Federal Bureau of Investigation finding the body of a flight attendant of the flight...