9/11 Can Never Be Forgotten

September 11, 2001 is a day that shook the United States to its core. Millions of Americans felt the pain, the loss, and the anger that came with the attack on their nation. It was a day of mourning, and when it comes to days of mourning it is difficult putting one’s pain into words. However, Leonard Pitts Jr. was able to move past the emotion. He put into his words, not only his own feelings, but the feelings of an entire nation. Pitts conveys the emotion felt after the terror attacks in his essay “Sept. 12, 2001: We’ll go forward from this moment” through his mournful, angry, and righteous tone.

In Ground Zero Berne uses many examples of imagery and metaphors to paint a descriptive picture of her surroundings and what she saw to enhance her reader’s experience. She uses the imagery to make her readers feel as if they were there and make them feel the same feelings of awareness, and sadness she did. Suzanne achieves this by recalling back to the horrid memories of 9/ll when “the skyscraper shrouded in black plastic, the boarded windows, the steel skeleton of the shattered Winter Garden.” (Berne 176), By using these extremely explicit and descriptive details Suzanne allows her readers to experience the rude awakening she had when she saw nothing in Ground Zero, but was able to recall the chaos that went on that day. Suzanne lets her readers understand what was going on in her mind , and clearly experience what she was feeling that day

Connect/Relate with the Audience: Many of us were around the age of 9 or 10 when these attacks occurred and didn't have a clue of what was going on. We just knew it wasn't normal.

The World Trade Center (WTC) held fairly high regard throughout New York as a structurally sound building, but the authors of 102 Minutes beg to differ on this opinion. They use various diagrams and statistics of the incredible impact and destruction the planes caused to the building, arguments against the poor architectural design and support of the towers, and periodic timestamps to make claims and factual statements about the events that occurred. The timestamps serve as a means of the authors building suspense in their audience, deepening uncertainty in the audience which intends to move them to read further and discover the office laborers’ fates. Moments like “At 9:19… we’re trapped… there’s smoke coming in. I don’t know what’s happening”(102 Minutes 186) and when Assistant Chief Callan“stood

One individual named Richard Drew, a professional journalist and photographer was in New York on 9/11. While the terrorist attack occurred he sat helpless and watched from the streets but decided to begin snapping pictures. However, the article entitled, “The Falling Man” by Tom Junod showed the controversy of what he was taking pictures of. Richard was taking pictures of the “Jumpers” (Junod, 2016, para. 6). The Jumpers were the citizens trapped within the twin towers with no other exit but to jump for possible freedom, but as they fell hundreds of stories from the buildings the people on the streets knew their was no help for them and the only thing that awaited them was a quick death. Within the article it states, “He was standing between a cop and an emergency technician, and each time one of them cried, "There goes another," his camera found a falling body and followed it down for a nine- or twelve-shot sequence” (Junod, 2016, para. 3). In this statement

It was just an average Tuesday morning in New York when the unthinkable happened. American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower at precisely 8:46 AM (Ritter). The entire city was instantly thrown into a frenzy of panic and disarray. No one knew what exactly had happened and citizens were looking for answers. Many tuned into NBC as they began coverage of the events at 9:52 AM (Wing). The network started off by interviewing a shocked Jennifer Overstein over the phone. Apparently, Jennifer had witnessed the first explosion as it happened. She didn’t know what had caused the explosion, but she was frantically explaining what happened. She gave descriptions of emergency vehicles, fearful citizens, and heavy smoke

BBC News reports on September 11, 2001 (9/11) there were multiple attacks by “Al Qaeda terrorists” in America (p.1). The planes crashed into the main building of the New York City (NY): World trade centre (WTC) and Pentagon. As a result about 3000 people died during this event. BBC (2015) identified it as “symbolic violence.” (p.1). The ramifications of this event were reported by media presenting drastic images/videos of building collapsing, fire, people jumping off the building, etc. The media presented the video constantly over and over when the plane crashed into the WTC (Baudains, 2013). Zizek (2002) emphasis on the imagery-symbolic reality of everyday experience as a feature of the twentieth century.

Feller’s comparison of the Paris bombings to the September 11 attacks is included to caution the audience about possible repercussions following the French

Ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once stated, “Silence is a source of great strength”. The lack of words or action can be particularly meaningful, especially when the breadth of the event is so astonishing that it cannot be put into words, such an event being the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The horrors endured by the global community on this day is a common experience that, frankly, can easily be characterized by silence and nothingness when thought about closely. With that, texts centered around 9/11 employ the juxtaposition of something and nothing to create the feelings felt by those impacted by the events. This common theme is seen in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the French-American documentary

In Ground Zero, readers can feel as Berne did by imagery and illustrative language. Her sharing experiences makes them have a visualization what happened on that day. Different from seeing Ground Zero on television, those observing directly not only deeply feel the miserable tragedy but also can image the pain

In this photo, it shows a man falling from the World Trade Center. He is called “The Falling Man”. This photo sent pins and needles straight to my heart. Seeing this photo, sends a great amount of sadness and sorrow into my soul. I believe this is one of the most powerful images of 9/11 because it takes a great amount of strength to make a decision like The Falling Man and many others did. This man, along with many others, chose to fall instead of being taken down by the flames and smoke. The Falling Man and many others like him, didn’t have a choice to live or die. They only had the choice in which way they died. Can you imagine making that decision?

The terrorist attacks in London Thursday served as a jarring reminder that in today's world, you never know what you might see when you pick up the newspaper or turn on the TV. Disturbing images of terror can trigger a visceral response no matter how close or far away from home the event happened.

The events that transpired on September 11, 2001, were a spectacle and a place of mourning that will forever be remembered. The collective memory of September 11th is remembered through the use of material items, one of which is film. The collective memory of 9/11 is useful for films. There are a lot of movies that use a tragic event in their plot and they use them in different ways, but the appropriateness of the use is debatable. A couple examples of movies that use 9/11 in the plot are Remember Me, a film directed by Allen Coulter in 2010, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, directed by Stephen Daldry in 2011. These two movies represent the idea that 9/11 was not only a spectacle, but also a place of mourning and that the collective memory of this event is material and usable. These ideas are represented in films that use 9/11 as a part of their plot begging to question the appropriateness of using a tragic event in a film for entertainment.

The constant media coverage of 9/11 is what has helped individuals to connect their individual memories with the factual, collective memories of 9/11. Brian Monahan the author of The shock of the news: media coverage and the making of 9/11 discussed the media covered on September 11th and how the audiences reacted to it. It helps explain and understand some of the ways the media processed and portrayed this day. The article discuses the initial audience responses and the moral shock. The September 11 terrorist attacks and their aftershock generated an exceptional level of media coverage. As the word traveled of the attack on that day, people immediately turned on the news for more information. The only topic covered on the news for weeks was 9/11 related issues. “Thousands of hours of television, radio programming, and an immeasurable amount of print-based reportage and commentary in newspapers and magazines and on the internet were devoted to the attacks” (Monahan pg 11). People were relying on the news to stay updated with what was happening post 9/11. “A long history of scholarship in sociology, media studies, and other academic disciplines has taught us that the news we consume influences the way we process events, asses issues, and assigns meaning to our personal experiences”(Monohan, pg XI). In other words, what we interpret from the news affects how we live our lives. “A wealth of research suggest that the manner in which news is packaged and presented is a key

September 11th, 2001 is known as the day in which Islamic terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City. 9/11 is also recognized as the day in which immense devastation spread throughout the United States. A photographer, Richard Drew captured a photograph of a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:41 a.m. during the attacks. The man, who appears in the image and eventually is notorious as The Falling Man identity remains unknown. Although, he is known to be one of the people who was trapped on the upper floors of the skyscraper who had two options, either to fall searching for safety or jump to escape the massive amounts of fire and smoke. This photo has become a horrific phenomenon because of how it represents what photography does for history. Furthermore, it accurately depicts the desperateness that was spread across America during a time of true tragedy. In order to truely understand the horror of September 11th, 2001 it is pertinent to include the kind of imagery that the image of The Falling Man displays.