Iyow - in your own words

The public release of the 9/11 tapes in the Moussaoui trial — recorded conversations of people trapped inside of the World Trade Center with 9-1-1 emergency response operators — has reopened a wound. I sit, reading The New York Times, looking at a family, an older couple who lost a child in his prime. He died early one morning at work. I weep. Reading the excerpts of the transcripts brings back those agonizing moments, the plunging bodies, a leap from a hundred stories up to avoid burning to death. The smoke, the marching throngs, and an explosion in my home city revive in those few words.

I read their pleas, “Please hurry.” “Yeah, hi, I am on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center, which had an explosion.” “We had a conference up here, there’s about 100 people up here.” The operator responded, “Just sit tight.”

Even as I feel the pain of the loss, I wonder at the delay in releasing the tapes. Why now? Why is the Times now publishing such beautifully orchestrated stories—following a family to pick up the tapes, listening together for the first time, sitting in their living room, snapping photographs and sharing that raw grief with us?

What does this information require us to do right now? Will it improve Bush’s popularity? Increase public support for the “war on terror”? Support for the occupation of Iraq? Distract us from the new anti-immigration legislation targeting predominantly Mexican undocumented citizens?

While I weep, I feel played with, twisted about, manipulated. I cannot even mourn without questioning our government, our media, and our country.

April 3, 2006