Essay on the Plane Crash Horror
Submitted by Altima on September 11 2001 16:55:00
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I felt so frustrated, so angry, so sad today. I felt so many incomprehensibly stressful emotions that I just had to sit down and write to maintain any semblance of calm. So I wrote this essay. I will proofread this later tonight then send it into school. Sorry about posting it in it's unedited form, but I wanted it to be timely. Here goes. Today, Words Failed. On September 11th, monsters rose from the darkness and committed an evil act previously unfathomable to most our imaginations. These monsters had faces. Two eyes, two arms, two legs. In every sense they resembled every other member of the human race. Before these events, one could probably see one of these monsters and allow their face to disappear from our short term memory, like so many unfamiliar faces in so many places. Who, what, where, when, how. Only a few of these can be answered. Far too many lie just beyond reach, the answers lying somewhere in the ashes of two of the most beautiful buildings on earth, now the tomb and crumbling memorial of thousands of lives. Incredgulity was my first reaction when I heard the news, but quickly afte I accepted the event as face, however I had underestimated the scale of the tragedy. When I saw the pictures... so many pictures... I made valiant efforts to defeat the advancing tears. I saw the film, again and again and again, of the second plane racing on a determined course into the second building. I saw the giant fireball, and my already distraught imagination filled in the rest. Toursits, businessmen, students and children, already aware of the fact that their plane was being controlled by malevelent individuals. Then at some point must have come the awareness, the dawning realisation that they were intended to be someone else’s sacrafice to some unholy purpose. I wonder how much pain was felt... I wonder if they were alive when the flames engulfed them, I wonder if they could feel the burn before the fuselage of the plane collapsed in around them, crushing their bodies. Then, the people in the buildings. Some of them were captured on film, waving for help from the top floors of the doomed towers, moments before they were pulled down in the giant cloud of dust and debris. There are far too many aspects of this event to capture, as I said, words tend to fail me, but words are the only way we can express our grief, sorrow and horror. So I shall make an attempt. As proven by the fact that thee were multiple targets systematically attacked (The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was en route to Camp David, the President’s secondary lodging) this was not an attack on a person or building. This was an attack on America. Fingers are being pointed in all directions and no one seems capable of looking straight at the disaster and taking it for what it is. This is not Pearl Harbour. This is comparable, but far, far worse. It was not a nation’s army attacking another nation’s army with guns and bombs. This was a few people hiding behind the weapons they were planning to use, innocent lives. These were people using innocents to kill more innocents. New York City is not a military base. America is not an army. America is an ideal, and an idea. An idea that people should not suffer because of their religion or the color of their skin. An idea that all men and women shall be free. It is an overused phrase, and seems to have lost it’s meaning over the country’s 230 years of existance. Admiral Yamamoto, after bombing Pearl Harbour, uttered this phrase in remorse, “What we have just done... I cannot think of anything that will enrage the Americans more. I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant.” There will be no trading on Wall Street tomorrow. No one wants to talk about money, but money is one of the major reasons the World Trade Center was attacked. Think of the name. World Trade Center. Those out there who believe this is a distant incident of no importance to them cannot be more wrong. But if we allow ourselves to be crushed by remorse and slip into recession after this unspeakable butchering of tens of thousands of lives, then they will have won. The perpetrators will be looking up at us from hell and laughing, for their goal will have been acheived. Admiral Yamamoto said another thing. He stated that “We could march down Pennsylvania Avenue and still not conquer America.” The ashes of the World Trade Center will remain for a long time, but we are not a dead relic of the superpower era. America is more than a building, two buildings. America is the Pheonix. America must rise from the ashes more powerful, and more determined to seek justice for every person living under God. “In three months time, all Hell will break loose.” -Timothy McVeigh. Three Months Ago. It is possible that this statement is now clear. In the wake of this incident, global politics have been a turbulent sea of accusations, denials and false claims of responsibility. America’s President vowed to hunt down the “Folks” that committed the atrocity. The way he described the cowardley devils as “folks” would be amusing if it weren’t making me sick to my stomache now. It sounds as if he would sooner invite them to a home cooked meal than execute them. Palestinian peasents have been dancing in the streets and cheering, children smiling and laughing amid the shocked denials of the understandably horrified Yasser Arafat. Osama bin Laden is nowhere to be found. The cryptic warning by McVeigh points to a domestic organisation. Knowing the Who may be impossible, however, and perhaps unnecesary, as long as we do not let their murserous attacks destroy the civilised world and the ideals it stand for. We must not let our collective scream for vengeance drown out the need to rebuild, to honor the memory of the thousands brutally robbed of life by preserving our will to go on, our ambition to achieve the most an individual can achieve. Collectively, that ambition makes our civilisation the greatest in all human history. There was a character in the book Catch-22, who mentioned that all great civilisations in the past have crumbled. He then stated the the frog has existed for 400,000,000 years. “Will your precious America last as long as the frog?” Darkness falls on the Eastern side of the Atlantic ocean. We could not hear the explosions. We did not feel the heat of the flames. But we saw the pictures. We heard their voices, the screaming as people ran from the chaos. We will share in the emotional and economic pain. The deaths are of people of many nationalities. We will feel the economic turmoil in the aftermath. Our support must be felt. We can consider ourselves lucky for having escaped the wrath of the inhuman monsters, but we cannot neglect our duty to do unto others as we’d have done to ourselves. September 11th 2001 will join December 7th, 1941. Another day to live in imfamy. Another day in which words cannot encompass the depth of the pain. Another day where people were born and people died. Just another day. |
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