We Are What We Loathe

Scores of people, maybe more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. At times they did this alone, on occasion in pairs. However it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.

The images of the "jumpers" proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even earlier the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the at once day in papers, including The New York Times, and at that time were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important components in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.

There would shortly, nevertheless, be another reaction. Those of us who were close to the epicenters of the 9/11 attacks would primarily grieve and mourn. Those who had some distance would indulge in the growing nationalist cant and calls for blood that would shortly triumph over reason and sanity. Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost without warning. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.