NEW YORK CITY
IT STILL doesn't seem real. Even after being just mere blocks away from the ruins of the Twin Towers, and staring into the twisted ruins of what was once the pinnacle of the New York skyline, it doesn't seem real. I'm not sure it would seem real if I were able to go up and touch the wreckage itself.
Visiting New York City after the terrorist attack, I expected to break down crying at any moment. But I didn't. I couldn't. After seeing all I've seen, I found I couldn't even begin to comprehend my emotions.
This is how many of us still feel. Even those of us who didn't lose any friends or relatives are stuck in shock, in awe of what has happened and in wonder of what is yet to come. We cannot even begin to grasp the gravity of what has happened.
Walking down town toward the smoke, I found myself constantly looking up at the sky, waiting for the Twin Towers to appear. When we got downtown, I found myself staring at the wreckage, wondering when it would disappear as part of a bad dream. I found myself touching cars that were flattened by the debris and covered in dust, and thinking, "it doesn't get any more real than this."
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And yet, I was far away from the reality of this incident, as most of us are. Not even seeing and touching the carnage gave me the ability to have a truly emotional reaction to what happened.
We as a society have been desensitized to these kinds of emotions. We watch the planes crashing or the buildings collapsing on the news, and they register to us only as surreal.
These images of the Twin Towers falling into themselves could just have easily been special effects in Hollywood's latest blockbuster. The footage of the planes crashing into the sides of the buildings seems almost too real to be real.
We don't expect our "reality TV" to be polished; we want grainy home-video images with shaky camerawork and unusual but believable situations. But now, we have the world's worst terrorist attack in clear network TV shots, from all the angles that we could possibly desire.
Another part of what makes this event so unreal is its implausibility. No destruction or loss of life of this scale has ever occurred on American soil. Even parallels to Pearl Harbor don't do this attack justice; Hawaii was halfway across that Pacific Ocean and not even a state when the Japanese attacked it.
We're unable to come to terms with this because we haven't experienced anything like it. The only place where we've seen anything like this is in the movies, because nothing of this magnitude ever has happened before.
Maybe the reality will begin to sink in when the little changes are made. When postcards of New York City no longer show the Twin Towers. When flight attendants no longer give out eating utensils on long flights. When we finish the rescue and salvage and rebuilding, and wake up from our shock to realize that we've gotten through the most extraordinary event in our entire lifetimes. This is when the significance of these attacks truly will be understood.
Joseph Stalin once said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." The public is so overcome by the staggering numbers of missing and dead - about 5,000 - that we sometimes don't even think of these people as human beings. When we see numbers being thrown out by officials, we shake our heads and sigh. But when we see footage of people jumping off the top of the World Trade Center, we perceive the disaster on a more individual level.
The personal things are what bring out emotion. I could not help but reflect when I saw pictures of people on missing signs all across New York City. Streets, doorways, walls and lampposts are adorned with pictures of people smiling, in wedding photos, on vacation, with husbands and wives and children.
With all the outpouring of concern and hope, it's easy to see the love these people's relatives and friends have for them. And in a city with eight million faces, with no survivors emerging from the rubble, one can only ponder the futility of these efforts. When we're forced to confront the pain of others and look into our own worries, this is where the disaster begins to become real.
The more personal this event gets, the more genuine it becomes. When my nine year-old brother tells me that he's sad that so many people died and scared of what else might happen, I only can hug him so hard. After spending a day looking firsthand at the results of this attack, this hug is what is truly real to me.
(Brian Cook is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at bcook@cavalierdaily.com.)
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