The Falling Man
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- David Foster Wallace
A focus on the idealised view of the jumper ("they would never have killed themselves!") blocks people from feeling the sheer terror and pain the jumper must have felt. The focus on some abstract concept like "suicide is bad, m'kay" rather than right-here-and-now burning flames and the terrifying strangle of unbreathable smoke.
The fact that so many jumped despite all our fears of heights and certain death, is proof of a greater horror in those floors. Society skews our perspective so we focus on the trivial, punishing those whose family members were lost, rather than learning something about the situation those poor people must have been in and empathising with their families.
Nothing like that would have helped in the wtc.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/425276/the-best-way-to-ev...
https://www.chamberofcommerce.com/herndon-va/33439780-skyscr...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_evacuation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_escape
https://sourceable.net/tablet/single/?name=high-rise-fires-r...
http://emergency.cornell.edu/building-evacuation/
In short: there are systems, and they work, to varying extents, for existing structures. Very tall supertowers are a particular challenge, as every internal safety system competes for space with other interior uses, and external evacuation systems are difficult to specify and design. Many possible systems would have been compromised, internally or externally, on the twin towers, from the same extraordinary threats as were compromising the structure itself: gross physical damge to the structure, which closed off internal stairwells, and a raging, jet-fuel-fed inferno, which was weakening steel structural beams, and which would have compromised numerous possible esternal escape structures based on natural or synthetic fiber rope or tube systems.
Aerial evacuation was similarly hampered both by smoke and by lack of rooftop access (doors to the WTC roofs were locked against internal use).
The most effective protection was simply not to be in the towers when they fell. The decision of some survivors to leave WTC1 after witnessing WTC2's strike was key, and the in-building announcements to not evacuate contributed directly to the death toll. The inhabitants of WTC2 above the impact zone were doomed in all but the most optimistic scenarios, which is troubling -- the situation bears some resemblance to the disaster on the RMS Titanic in 1914, for which I strongly recommend the 1954 film A Night to Remember.
It's worth remembering that the daytime occupancy of the WTC complex could exceed 50,000, and estimates are that 17,400 people were in the towers at the time of the attacks. Over 84% of the occupants managed to escape successfully (the death total of 2,753 includes both the hijackers themselves and occupants of the two flights which struck the towers). That's a grim success under the circumstances.
At that point, you basically get to pick from being burned alive or hitting the pavement with the third option being burned and falling off the building anyway being the likely outcome. You might be that one in a million that survives the fall, its happened before. Heck, given rawfan's comment[1], they might not have had a choice anyway.
Its not suicide. They didn't want to die that day. Its choosing which way you are going to be murdered.
I think it's different in cultures where suicide is an acceptable (and sometimes even lauded) action in some circumstances.
Soldier jumping on a grenade to save buddies: fine. Here the 'suicide' is accepted because there's a greater principle.
But the greater threat in a burning building is all the pain before certain death, rather than no pain before certain death. I don't even consider it suicide, just the only option to escape the pain that happens to also end in death.
Cynicism is a cancer.
We damn those who gave up on trying after having been given the greatest gift that can be received.
The point is life - more, better, higher, more beautiful, more intelligent, more creative. Anything that gets in the way of the unfoldment of life in the universe will be deemed bad.
The man that fell from that tower that day didn't want his world to be what it was on that sad day. He didn't give up as you put it. To me he is brave.
There is no such censoring of "murder" news.
He either chose, or was unable to overcome psychological impulses, to act in a way that he took his own life.
I'm looking at a definition of suicide that includes the word "voluntary", which could well be contested given the extreme threat and lack of alternative here. At the same time, I do not personally see all suicide as unwarranted, wrong, or sinful (though there are cases in which I'd strongly prefer people didn't kill themselves).
The Falling Man, and the many others who similarly lept from the Twin Towers, and those who similarly take their lives in the face of desperate circumstances are what they are. In many cases the label "suicide" fits. I don't find it dishonourable.
But causality and life are complicated, words express ideas, and ideas are our own mental models. If you trace events back to original causes you find numerous complications at ascribing simple terms and unambiguous labels to them. Sometimes the ambiguity is greater, sometimes lesser.
Describing these particular deaths as both murder and suicide strikes me as defensible.
But given that is death was absolutely imminent within a few minutes, I really don't think this is a case of 'suicide' in any of the remotely classical scenarios.
It's not 'suicide' in any reasonable sense of the term.
Most people who commit suicide are not objectively in situations of extreme difficulty. Many wealthy, successful people commit prison. Surely, negative conditions are correlated with suicide, but it's not the driver. It's a psychological/spiritual issue.
A lot of it is religious. It is considered a great sin in popular religions. Even though many don't follow religion it left this ingrained idea in the culture.
Also perhaps is seen as shameful. Part of the desire to censor the images was probably not purely to respect the victims, but also to hide the act, because it is shameful ("don't show this to the children" type thing)
The reason it is shameful is that it is seen as the most radical act of "giving up". And that doesn't jive with the "you can overcome anything with hard work" culture.
You can read this in how people talked about it -- "they were forced out" instead of "they decided to jump". Both are correct at some level. But first seems more appropriate in our culture.
One other level, perhaps even unconsciously we understand there is a possibility of contagion. It has happened and actually has been observed (someone in a high school does, and then usually a string of suicided might follow, the more talk and media coverage the more suicides follow etc). Maybe at some point in that past that fear of contagion got codified as a taboo...
Well partially, but there is also that in ancient times it was considered that you would be depriving the emperor/king/state of his rightful property (or hers obv).
Infact in North Korea today if you commit suicide your family will be sent to a slave labour camp for that same reason.
So while I agree that american culture has misguided attitude on suicide, I don't think your explanation works.
The way he put it, which says it all for me, was that the jumpers were a sort of testimony to the fact there was no way out and no hope for the people trapped up there.
There's lots of cultural stigma to suicide, and one of the reasons for that is there is always reason to hope. The poor souls up there ran out of reasons.
I was 150 miles away in Albany. When the state government and banks dismissed employees, people were literally running in a daze to go home. I stood on the corner of the busiest street downtown waiting for my wife to pick me up -- everyone scurried off and the streets were utterly empty and silent at lunchtime. It was literally just me and an art installation statue of a guy reading a newspaper. The silence was eerie and bizarre.
It's interesting that so many pro-market people claim to be individualists, because the view that the market should dictate everyone's life is as collectivist as it gets.
This makes no sense.
Society does not 'deny' you almost anything.
That someone cannot or choses not to buy something is not 'denial'.
"because the view that the market should dictate "
???? The market does not dictate anything. The 'market' is just the sum totality of 'individual choices'.
> society thinks it's okay to deny you healthcare and starve you to death.
You seem to be saying that it's a problem if society makes you participate in the free market, but it's not a problem when you have to participate in an unfree market instead of a free market.
(And of course it's worth mentioning that even the USA, capitalist enemy #1, has Medicare and doesn't let people starve.)
> the view that the market should dictate everyone's life is as collectivist as it gets.
Well, your life is either going to be defined by a system where people trade goods and services in an ad hoc manner uncontrolled by a government, or in a planned manner explicitly controlled by a government (possibly in negotiation with a strong labor union).
One of these is more individualistic. It's not the one where people work real hard to get a job (one of the few), keep the same job for all 40 years of their working life, aggressively lobby against people choosing to pay custom to the disruptive competition which employs immigrants (and protest it by burning tires in the streets), et cetera. We could argue many things saying that system is superior but individualism isn't one of them.
Though not officially identified, it is thought to be Jonathan Briley. A lot of people were killed that day. This is just one story. [0] You can view a documentary about this image here ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gbxJ4xUDE (1hr 11m)
RIP Jonathan.
Jonathan Briley is discussed in the article. While likely, it's not certain.
> The subject of the image, whose identity remains uncertain,...
The uncertainty, if memory serves me from viewing the above documentary, is at the request of the family for religious reasons.
http://www.sosparachute.com/en/site/sos
And an ABC News story asked the same question two months after 9/11:
You might as well ask why people who work in tall buildings don't take parachutes to work themselves. The answer is obvious, and I hope it's equally obvious why buildings don't do this.
On a related note: having to send your shoes through the x-ray machine in an airport security line is almost as bad of an idea. :/
Do you know how many individual paratroopers have jumped out of planes? There is no way the cost is prohibitive.
Parachuting is one of the last ways I'd want to go down, but, why wouldn't I want one if my only choice were to splat or char?
That isn't your only choice because the scenario is exceedingly unlikely to happen.
If safety is your thing, you'd be much better off spending the several thousand dollars on doctors visits, healthier food, gym memberships, and/or public transit throughout the year.
It's unlikely a seatbelt will save my life, but every car I go in has multiple.
The original argument presented here is equivalent to arguing it's too expensive and useless to carry enough lifeboat capacity for everyone on a ship after the Titanic sunk. It's extremely unlikely that I'll ever impact an iceberg.
I've never put on a parachute or practiced deploying one.
Lifeboats are not just for iceberg collisions. There are many reasons for a boat to sink that don't involve a collision.
Buildings don't just collapse from airplane collisions; fires, bombs, earthquakes, structural failure, hostile takeover, and more could all be scenarios where you might only survive if you have a chute.
Obviously these are rhetorical questions: it is far, far more likely to be hit by lightning than to die in a building collapse.
If you truly believe this risk is worth mitigating I would put my money/time where my mouth is and not depend on some building supervisor to keep enough parachutes around and keep them in good condition. Instead you should get some training*, buy a BASE jumping parachute and take it with you when you go above 60m. As you say, they are relatively inexpensive.
[1] Note: be careful -- you are much more likely to be killed in your training than you are to need to use it.
Yes: it's far more cost effective to avoid the risk altogether than attempt to mitigate the exceptionally unlikely event of a very-tall-building collapse or fire, particularly through use of, say, parachutes (into an urban landscape with many landing hazards and few readily accessible landing zones).
On the other hand, that decision also means foregoing opportunities, including the income potential of working for a firm in or near a dense downtown with such tall office towers in it. A cost you might be willing to accept.
Risks and costs can be balanced, though the cases in which people make decisions which are both fully informed and rational strike me as relatively rare.
Cost of installation is by no means the only factor or cost in making a safety feature. In another comment, you appeal to the many number of paratroopers who have jumped out of planes as prof that it can be cost-effectively, as if the cost of a paratrooper's jump could be reduced to the cost of a parachute.
Even if it took someone several minutes to strap on a backpack-like device, it would likely save lives in many scenarios.
As to my appeal to the cost of paratroopers' parachutes, that was in direct response to a very specific claim in the post I responded it to:
>It would be expensive to outfit all tall buildings with parachutes
The WTC (like all modern high-rises in the developed world) had a pretty impressive set of firefighting and evacuation infrastructure, procedures, and personnel. This training video goes through it pretty well [0].
- Smoke detectors and pull stations everywhere to ensure any fire is detected and responded to quickly (i.e. before it gets out of hand). There was a fire station across the street.
- A huge console for responding firefighters to see the location of alarm conditions, make building or floor-wide announcements, and even have two-way conversations with intercom stations on particular floors.
- Sprinklers and redundant power for the pumps that run them.
- Fans to push smoke out of the building and supply clean air to evacuation routes.
- Fire stairs, kept closed under positive pressure to keep smoke out, kept unobstructed by regular patrols, encased in material that wouldn't burn through for hours.
- A network of piping and wall-mounted hoses easily fed from the dedicated fire-truck parking.
- Fire drills, designated authorities for the evacuation of each floor, security personnel trained to watch over the fire alarm equipment.
It's not like the WTC wasn't prepared to evacuate in a fire. It's just that nobody anticipated all that infrastructure (pipes, stairwells, etc) getting sheared through by an airplane.
Impact by planes had been imagined prior to the crashes, but I don't know if it had been by the designers. Considering these were very tall structures, it seems likely someone would have at least briefly imagined it.
"The airliner that struck the North Tower struck it perpendicular to the north face. The impact severed all the elevators and all three stairwells. The airliner that struck the South Tower struck at an angle, severing two stairwells, but it left Stairway A, the one they were using, more or less intact."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Clark_(September_11_surv...
Seriously NYC doesn't have any police/rescue helicopters?
If you're referring the 9/11 situation, this is the reason why it wasn't attempted - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Clark_(September_11_surv...
That said, I suspect that had they known the towers were going to go down within 2 hours, there might have been some different decisions made. But that's just hindsight. :/