Fall or Jump?

 

20 Years After 9/11, Here’s What You Didn’t Realize About the Man Who Fell From the World Trade Center

Por Keith Dias 

Medium

7 min

August 21, 2021

Ver Original

Rethinking the deadly choice of the “Falling Man”

Keith Dias

Aug 17 · 6 min read

“The Falling Man”, taken September 11, 2001, shows a man falling from the Twin Towers in NYC during the terrorist attacks/Photo Credit: Richard Drew/AP

A question about death

On this 20th anniversary of the devastating terrorist attacks that took place at The World Trade Center in New York City, I want to draw your attention to the very small group of individuals who chose to fall from the buildings, instead of staying inside.

Of the 2606 victims that were murdered on September 11th, 2001, after two passenger jets were hijacked and driven into the North and South Towers, most of them died as a result of the impact of the jets, or when the buildings came crashing down to the ground afterward.

Less than 200 (or 8 percent) of them died a completely different way. They decided to jump or fall.

Photographer Richard Drew captured one such individual in an iconic and controversial image titled “The Falling Man”.

To me, this picture of a man, mid-air, streaming to his death, doesn’t just show us one of the few real images of someone actually dying in the terrorist attacks that day.

It doesn’t just represent the horrors of that morning.

In addition to those things, it poses an interesting question for all people who walk this earth:

What role will you play in deciding what will happen in the moments before your own death?

The stigma of choosing how to die

One day after the attacks, when the photo first appeared on page 7 of the New York Times, and in hundreds of newspapers across the country, it was met with outrage.

People argued that the photo “exploited a man’s death, stripped him of his dignity, invaded his privacy, and turned tragedy into leering pornography.”

In most of these papers, the photo ran once, and then never again. Even now, two decades later, it is extremely difficult to look at and think about.

When someone jumps to their death, there can be some inherent judgment associated with the act. It can come with the stigma of suicide. There is an implied weakness on the part of a person who commits the act of orchestrating their own demise.

I should note that none of the people who fell from the buildings on September 11th were deemed to have ‘jumped’ by the medical examiner. They were classified as ‘fallers’.

Saying that they were forced out or blown out by the smoke and fire may have seemed like a clever way to protect them from negative judgment.

This situation, though obviously different from a suicide, still shared that same stigma in the minds of some.

While the exact identity of the falling man has not been established, there were individuals who seemed, at one moment or another, to fit the description.

When Globe and Mail reporter Peter Cheney, for example, tracked down the daughter of a missing pastry chef who resembled the falling man, and who had also worked in the restaurant at the top of the North Tower, he was met with this angry response:

“That piece of shit is not my father”

The Falling Man’s choice

But the stigma is misplaced here.

If you look closely at the horrific predicament that the people at the top of the towers were faced with, you will realize that they only had two real options available to them:

Die inside, or die outside.

When American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower at 8:46 am, it smashed through floors 93 to 99, and the ensuing fire eliminated all potential escape routes for anyone trapped above those floors.

Similarly, after United Airlines flight 175 crashed into floors 77 to 85 of the South Tower at 9:02 am, it left only one operable stairwell available for the hundreds trapped above.

Even the roofs were not a possibility, as all access doors were locked. Helicopters that circled above could not locate anyone on the top of the buildings.

The direction that one is normally given when there is a fire in a high-rise apartment is to ‘stay put’. That is exactly what 9–1–1 operators told people who called for help from the buildings on that day. This is called a ‘defend in place’ strategy, and it is a sound one in virtually every scenario involving a fire in a high-rise.

But not in this case.

In this rare instance, if you rule out the minuscule chance of being rescued via divine intervention, the people trapped inside the top levels of the towers only had two imminent outcomes, and both of them involved dying.

Attack locations of the aircraft on the World Trade Center — Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons

A photo of a living person

So the falling man made the most difficult of decisions.

Rather than staying inside, waiting for the possibility of dying from smoke inhalation, from exposure to fire, or from the collapsing building, he took matters into his own hands.

He flew through the air.

He determined his own path, in the brief moments before his death.

The amazing thing about the photograph of this falling man is that, in the picture, he is still alive.

We think of him as deceased — we associate him with death — but at that moment, he is not.

The descent from the towers is estimated at a mere 10 seconds, but make no mistake, in that very short time, this man experienced freedom from the burning towers.

This is a photo of a living person, escaping to freedom.

What choice will you make?

In this 20th year since the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City, let’s spend this moment to pause and think about the decision made by the man in the photo taken by Richard Drew.

There was bravery in his falling.

The Falling Man decided to choose his own demise. Knowing that his death was near, he took control of his final moments when he purposely fell from the towers, in pursuit of freedom, instead of waiting inside the burning building.

It was a tremendously difficult thing to do, and that is why so few people actually did it.

And as I think about it now, I realize that we all have this same decision to make for ourselves.

I see the Falling Man everywhere.

I see him in the face of every man, woman, and child who is imprisoned in an abusive relationship.

I see him in the face of those desperate citizens who cannot pull themselves out of poverty because of systemic oppression.

I see him in the pain of those people who cannot afford to pay for their life-saving surgeries because of a broken health care system.

I’ve recently seen him in the eyes of those Afghani refugees fleeing the Taliban, in mid-August of this year.

I’ve seen him in the faces of the officers who were brutalized on January 6th of this year defending the Capitol.

And yes, I’ve even seen him in the Britney Spears conservatorship case.

Our lives on this earth are short. Not as short as the time it took to fall from those towers on September 11th, 2001, but in comparison to the age of our world, or our universe, our lives are over in an instant.

It is a very brief timespan that frames our lives, and from the moment we are born, we are, in essence, dying.

Death is coming for us, faster than we think.

But it’s not here yet.

And the one thing that you still have right now is the ability to impact your own destiny.

No matter what challenges you face right now, you are free to think and to feel, and to act in ways that can shape your experiences.

Part of the reason you can do this is because you live in this country which, at its core, was founded on an ideal of freedom for all.

But the other reason you can do this is because the last and only real thing you have control over is your own mind.

Like Mohandas Gandhi, who went on a successful hunger strike in India to protest British rule in the early 20th century, your internal strength has the power to overcome any external threat to your freedom.

You have choices about how you will react to any situation that assaults your liberties.

You can choose to do nothing at all in the face of those assaults, understanding that your freedom may be further restricted or removed.

Or you can do whatever is required to ensure you get to experience those liberties again.

What path have you chosen?

Yes, you can make decisions that will allow you to take from this life all it has to offer.

You can go out on your own terms.

On this 20th anniversary of 9/11, I hope you use the Falling Man as inspiration for that.