Head Strong | A painful, but needed, 9/11 image

By Michael Smerconish

September 16, 2007

 

I marked the sixth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, without once seeing the infamous image of United Airlines Flight 175 slamming into the South Tower. I didn't purposely avoid it, nor did I go looking for this most visual reminder. But not once in the normal course of my day Tuesday did I see that formerly omnipresent image of a jumbo airplane hitting a national landmark.

 

We used to see it too much - so often that we became desensitized to the brutality of what it represented. Now, I fear, we face the other extreme - of forgetting the savagery of what was perpetrated against us. Consider that a USA Today/Gallup poll taken Sept. 7 and 8 found that only 6 percent of Americans planned to recognize the Sept. 11 anniversary in any formal sense; just 29 percent (actually up from previous years) said their own lives had permanently changed as a result of the attacks.

 

I chalk that up to terror fatigue. And the risk we run by avoiding the image is of promoting a further disconnect between Americans and our lingering risk at the hands of radical Islam.

 

My feelings are tempered only by my acquaintance with Ellen Saracini, widow of Victor Saracini, the captain of the very flight to which I refer. Vic was a former Navy pilot who settled in Yardley and had worked for United Airlines for 16 years. Every time that footage rolls, it shows him flying straight into heaven. No doubt that is brutal for his wife and daughters to see, and I certainly don't wish to disrespect his memory. So this week, I decided to ask Ellen how she feels about the televising of that image.

 

"Good question," she said. "I don't know if I even can answer that fully. I have both views of it. If you're going to talk to me about children looking at that, I have a really hard time. I think they're just too young and too innocent to be able to see something so horrific. When you talk about adults seeing something, I do want everyone to remember."

 

She told me her own daughters, Kirsten and Brielle, won't talk to her about it: "They just ignore it." Kirsten, her eldest, has expressed through her writing the heartache her father's passing has caused:

 

i travel lightly,

 

today i've left behind the

 

lilacs, quilts, and fruit assortments

 

to carry an infallible image:

 

the still shot of your plane

 

And Brielle has had difficulty accepting the long hours her mother has spent with her "child number three," a reference to Ellen's advocacy for the Garden of Reflection, the Lower Makefield tribute to victims of Sept. 11.

 

Ellen herself does not watch the footage, and hasn't since she saw it on TV on that fateful day.

 

'It tears me apart'

"It's a very hard image. I always go back to thinking about my children seeing it, and it tears me apart when they have to look at that, because they are living now a consequence because of that," Ellen said.

 

But her fellow Americans are a different story. She - the widow of the man piloting the plane that the world has watched crash - shares my view that there is a redeeming value in revisiting those images, at least once a year.

 

"I do think everyone needs to remember," she said. "It's a shame that it has to be such a stark reminder, because it is a visual. All throughout history . . . we saw Kennedy being shot. I was a young girl, and I remember that day because I was looking at my mother and I couldn't believe the expression on my mother's face."

 

Pretty incredible. Even though she herself will not rewatch Flight 175's final crash, and regardless of the strain that image has caused her daughters, Ellen Saracini wants the rest of us to continue to replay her husband's last moments.

 

We must remember

Why? So we don't forget the gravity of what happened to our country that day. And so we remember to value anything we were lucky enough to hold onto after 9/11.

 

"The image is one that we all agonize over as we watch it," she said. "It is so unimaginable that it could have happened that it keeps our curiosity always. Do I want people to never forget? For me, I want them to gain respect for the things you take for granted and the things you should respect. Not the image . . . but for some the image is the only thing that gets them to remember.

 

"It was just so horrendous that nobody could believe what was happening. And I think that's the reason why people want to see it again, because they have to get in their minds . . . it is a true story. It did happen."

 

Ellen Saracini knows this on a more personal level than any could ever imagine. The rest of us should continue to see for ourselves.

 

Michael Smerconish's column appears on Thursdays in the Daily News and on Sundays in Currents. Michael can be heard from 5:30 to 9 a.m. weekdays on "The Big Talker," WPHT-AM (1210). Contact him via the Web at http://www.mastalk.com.