While desperate people faced sudden death,
our worries seemed embarrassingly trivial.
The emotions
seemed to come as quickly and regularly as the news
flashes: shock, horror, fear, revulsion, anger, more and more
shock, sorrow, numbness, confusion ...
But shame?
And yet there it was, shame -- shame that in those
minutes in which the airliners were changing course and, for
all we today know, 
changing
the course of history, in those earliest hours before the phone
calls and e-mails and morning news programs alerted us to what
was happening to other human beings in New York City and Washington,
D.C., we thought our own petty lives had problems.
In this particular case, it included a dog that
had been skunked the night before, a car door nicked in a parking
lot and a pilot light out on the furnace. I blush to write them
down. I can barely believe there was ever room in my head to
worry about such trivialities.
What fills the mind instead are the images brought
to us, too often live, by television, and what the imagination
does with those powerful suggestions. What was it like for those
266 passengers and crew aboard the doomed airlines as they realized,
first, that their leisurely flight across America was not going
to end with family and friends and flowers at the luggage carousel
but end, forever, with a slow, deliberate descent into buildings
filled with early-morning workers?
What possible measure of terror could describe
what it must have been like for one of those thousands of office
workers -- pictures of children on their desk, plans for the
weekend underway, a fresh coffee steaming beside the morning
paper -- to look out their 50th or 90th storey window and see,
in what must have appeared to be slow motion, a commercial jet
coming straight for them?
What went through the mind of the man who locked
himself in the airplane washroom and used his final few moments
to try and alert the authorities through his cellphone? Who among
us yesterday morning did not, at least for a moment, try and
imagine how he or she would behave under such circumstance --
only to shudder at the probabilities?
What cascading thoughts tumbled through the head
of the man in the dark pants before he elected to drop out of
an upper window of the World Trade Center and plummet to a certain
death?
What was it inside those men and women firefighters
that drove them on inside the building even though they had to
know there was 
a
distinct danger that it might collapse on them? And even after
it had fallen and crushed hundreds of them, what possible force
lay within those other firefighters who, knowing full well what
had just happened to their own, still fought and clawed to get
in and see if they could still save some lives?
What, for that matter, was it like for the tens
of thousands, hundreds of thousands, who had some large or small
link to those inside the World Trade Center or the Pentagon in
Washington -- a daughter or son, mother, father, relative, friend,
colleague -- and who were forced to suffer through hour after
hour of live television horror and endless replay, their own
eyes confirming again and again what their ears may not hear
for days?
Even to mention a skunked dog seems silly, but
it is done to show that we are all affected, regardless of distance
or circumstance. Canada may well be a country where someone once
hijacked a bus and tried to ram it into Parliament Hill, only
to get stuck in the mud, but it is also right next door, and
if you choose to stand under the American umbrella you cannot
expect to remain dry and unaffected forever.
Something happened on Tuesday, Sept. 11 that goes
far beyond an attack, however successful, on Fortress America;
it is also an attack on all North American lives, and the sense
of safety and faith that is so essential to the way ordinary
lives were lived right up until the tail end of rush hour yesterday
morning.
In part, that has to do with the penetrating reach
of live television. It is one thing to read, and learn, about
the thousands who died at Ypres or the Somme, one thing to know
those who lived through 
the
horrors of the last great war, but quite another to be standing
in the safety of one's own home and stare, disbelieving, as perhaps
10,000 people or more die in a single collapsing moment. How
wrenching that, precisely as the two towers collapsed, every
channel carrying the disaster kept stamping the word "LIVE"
over the screen.
In some ways, the often poor camera coverage made
it strangely all the more powerful. While commentators kept referring
to such big-project disaster movies as Pearl Harbor and Independence
Day, the Hollywood depictions of such disaster seem far more
real than what people found themselves staring at on Tuesday.
The plane headed toward the second tower looked like a toy, the
fire lacked flame, the characters were unknown -- and yet the
emotions of a movie theatre, no matter how manipulated, could
never compare. Movies also end. This drama may unfold for years.
If movies are such a poor comparison, what then
to turn to? The 135,000 who died in the firebombing of Dresden?
The 130,000 who died when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima?
But these were acts of war, and as such endlessly
debatable.
Consider for a moment the words of this reporter:
"The weight of the cloud itself took charge, it began to
thin and spread laterally. At one
minute it was white, at another dark and dirty, as if it carried
up a load of earth and cinders." It is not live coverage
from an on-the-scene reporter in New York City yesterday, but
the record of Pliny the Younger as he witnessed the explosion
of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, and the sudden death of untold thousands
in the town of Pompeii.
Closer perhaps, but volcanoes and earthquakes and
typhoons are acts of nature, or as the insurance agencies like
to put it, "acts of God." What happened in New York
City and Washington was so purely an "act of man" that
one wonders which could ever possibly acknowledge having committed
it.
There is, in fact, nothing quite known to compare
with such an act of terrorism, where the innocent are the intended
victims, where the act is deliberate, and where the reason is,
at least for now, unknown. No wonder terrorism carries with it
a fear unlike that known in war or weather, for it involves the
utter failure of systems in which people have put their faith.
If something like this can come from the hijacking
of commercial airlines, something most people believed already
a thing of the past, what could come of missiles or nuclear weapons
or biochemical warfare? This might feel like the end; but it
might only be the beginning.
In part, this is the problem with instant television
-- the images arrive long before any understanding. If one thing
stood out yesterday morning beyond the shock and horror, it was
the tremendous uncertainty that emanated from the live news programs.
Voices held steady, but no one seemed to have a clue what was
happening or what it might mean.
Nor was there any sense of leadership racing to
fill whatever vacuums arose from such varied explosions. George
W. Bush, the President, was in Florida, apparently. In Canada,
it was Ontario Premier Mike Harris, who could not possibly know
anything about the situation, who came on live to calm and assure
Canadians an hour or so before the Prime Minister made his appearance.
Live coverage of news events has been around since
1954, when ABC decided to telecast the McCarthy hearings into
un-American activities, but its true power dates from the John
F. Kennedy assassination of 1963. Since then, there has been
a second Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, the
Gulf War, and a dozen more horrific events carried live in the
living room. Whenever some small sense is made of any of them,
it tends to come months or years after the images flash.
It leaves viewer and newscaster in roughly the
same position as the dazed man found wandering on the shoulder
beside a roadside accident. His car is destroyed, yet he hasn't
the foggiest notion of what happened.
The danger here is well documented. Six years ago,
in the hours after Timothy McVeigh of the all-American looks
detonated a truckload of explosives in Oklahoma City -- killing
168 people, including 19 children he dismissed as "collateral
damage" -- radio and television reported a search was on
for two men of "Middle Eastern appearance" who were
sighted near the building earlier.
It did not take long for the finger pointing to
begin -- Saddam Hussein was blamed, Afghanistan was suspected
-- and television was again there to help the frenzy along, repeatedly
offering instant replays of celebrating Palestinians. This, before
anything at all was known -- even who had been killed.
The constant reference to Pearl Harbor was a reminder,
as well, of the enormous American anger that was unleashed 60
years ago when 2,348 were killed in the Japanese attack on the
naval base. One can only imagine what direction that anger will
take this time.
But we must also know that, in today's wired world,
we will be following it -- live.
And that, no matter how much we might wish otherwise,
it has become part of our lives.
*Roy MacGregor has been a journalist for 25
years, working for such publications as the Ottawa Citizen, 
The Toronto Star, Maclean's Magazine,
the Canadian Magazine, and Today Magazine. A four-time National
Magazine Awards winner and seven-time finalist for the National
Newspaper Awards, he won top sports reporter in 1995. He is also
the author of 16 books, including 8 in the popular Screech Owl
mystery series for children, and the Home Team which he co-wrote
with NHL legend Ken Dryden. MacGregor is now a columnist-at-large
for the National Post.
