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Where Were You on 9-11?
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Jim Moore
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Dec 22, 2002 12:29 PST
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Where Were You on Sept. 11?
By Jim Moore, Editor of TennTimes - the News
Those of us old enough to remember November 22, 1963 have two events we
will always remember where we were when we had that experience. The
other is September 11, 2001.
About 39 years ago, I was a freshman in college at the University of
Kansas. I lived in a "scholarship house" with a housemother and about 35
male students (fraternity without a name?) and it was lunchtime.
The housemother came into the dining room from her private quarters and
said, quite simply, "there's something wrong with the television set."
What was "wrong" was the horrible news of Dallas, Texas crackling around
the world.
On Sept. 21, 2001, I was quite sublime in my ignorance.
I'd been out in the front yard raking leaves and cleaning up. Where I
live - on the far side of a distant hill - I can get no TV reception at
all and very little radio.
On such a nice day, I wouldn't have been watching it if I did. I still
would have been outdoors.
My neighbor called and said, in tears, that something terrible was
happening and I should come over and look at the news on their TV.
That first sight of the plane hitting the World Trade Center made me
ache physically - every nerve, every muscle, every molecule of my body
cried out in agonizing silence, "Oh, dear God, please no!"
It still brings tears to my eyes even now as I write this line a year
later.
The jumpers.
That was the most soul-ripping thing I have seen on television - ever.
That made it so much more personal as you watched individual men and
women plunging to their deaths - some with the serenity of angels.
One man and woman who apparently worked together held hands, looked each
other in the face, smiled (according to some of the blowups) and stepped
off into Eternity.
Some soared like eagles, their arms outspread and a look of confidence
on their faces. They were going Home to God.
Others were frightened - their mouths open in screams we could not hear.
Sometimes as a reporter I have stood in Death's shadow, but never have I
experienced anything like what I watched from 1500 miles away on 9-11.
Once, in my first newspaper job (Pratt, KS Daily Tribune), I 'b been
sent by my editor to a farmhouse that was burning to the ground.
On the highway, on the way there, something happened. A station wagon
full of Cub Scouts in front of me passed a semi and hit an oncoming car
head-on. Right before my very eyes.
The kids weren't hurt bad, amazingly, most just shaken up. But as the
afternoon sun dropped to the trees, I witnessed one of the most
heart-breaking moments I have seen firsthand.
The woman in the car they hit was dying. She had been thrown from her
car into a field.
I climbed the fence and approached the injured woman, who was lying on
her back, her head in the lap of the man who had been in the car with
her. Almost instantly, I sensed that I was – for the first time in my
life – watching someone die.
I started to raise my camera and the man looked up at me. He never said
a word, but I could see the most searing pain in his eyes, a pleading
pain that cried out, “Please don’t do this!”
Confused, I lowered the camera as the impact of his agony hit me full
force. Then I backed away. I could almost feel an invisible line I had
crossed, a physical line in the dirt as well as an emotional and
spiritual line of the soul.
Could there be any more private a moment than the moment of death? And
what kind of human being was I to invade that privacy?
For a moment, I didn’t know what to do. I knew – or thought I knew –
what my editor would expect. He would expect me to do my job.
But what was my job?
Was it to take a picture of a bloodied and torn woman as she breathed
her last gasps of life? Was there an alternative? I had no idea what
their relationship was to each other – husband and wife, lovers,
friends?
Slowly, as inconspicuously as I dared, I circled around to catch a
sinking sun behind them, as he cradled her head in his lap, sitting with
her on the ground.
I didn’t show the blood and torn flesh, nor did I show the anguish in
the man’s face as his companion was torn from him.
It was at that moment that I realized that death, even as sudden and
traumatic as this was, was also a moment of grace and dignity.
I tried to capture that, along with the compassion and caring of the man
whose face would be the last thing she ever saw.
Mission accomplished, I silently withdrew, casting to the heavens a
silent prayer for her soul and his pain, then rushed on towards the
original assignment, my hands trembling on the steering wheel.
I was able to get some good photos of the farmhouse, still a huge ball
of fire, but the whole time, my thoughts were on an unknown man and a
dying woman I had last seen in a Kansas wheat field.
September 11, 2001 was also such a day - but 3,000-fold more painful.
Nor will I ever forget the demons and the angels that mysteriously
showed up in those early photos and videos from CNN and the Associated
Press.
The demons appeared as face patterns in the smoke and flames - the angel
appeared as a small object that first strikes you as a bird - a huge
bird.
Clearly, both the lords of Light and Dark had gathered in Manhattan that
crisp autumn morning. They descended suddenly, turning day into night.
Before I came back to home much later that afternoon, my neighbor and I
stood in her front yard.
Facing each other, we held hands - like the couple who soared into the
hereafter, and we prayed - four ourselves and our children and spouse,
for our community and for our nation, and for the Family of Humankind,
and we asked that the Father's will be done.
Life has never been the same since.
Jim Moore is manager of Phoenix Technologies, a website design and
promotion service in Williamsport, TN, where he also serves as online
editor of TennTimes - the News (http://westviewnews.virtualave.net),
America's largest online newspaper. He has won numerous writing and web
design awards, is a member of the International Association of
Webmasters & Designers and for eight years produced, directed and hosted
"The Omega Report", a popular hour-long TV documentary cablecast into
1.5 million homes from Nashville to Boston.
He publishes a free monthly newsletter, "On the Go!", for busy people
like you.
Subscribe here, or send an email to OntheGo-s-@topica.com.
He may also be reached at Phoenix Technologies .
Copyright 2002 by The Phoenix Foundation. All rights reserved.
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