Reflections on United 93

I just finished watching United 93. Probably a poor movie choice for tonight, but I wanted to watch it when I knew I could sit down and watch it start to finish and not be disturbed. Let me just add, that I was fortunate enough to not lose anyone on 9/11. The people I knew who could have been in the Towers were both not there. The family of our church members who were in the Pentagon were far from the crash site. My loved ones were all on the ground, and I got in touch with M, living in NYC at the time, fairly early into the crisis. So, even though it shook me, as it did all of us, it's been five years, I've healed, right? I don't know. I was wholly unprepared for my reaction to the movie. Less than twenty minutes into it, an air-traffic controller reports a plane that isn't responding, and much to my shock, I started to shake. I realized I was crying and hadn't even known it. I had to pause the movie to regain control of myself. The other movie, the made for TV one, focused on the relationships, the people on the plan and the calls they made, the families finding out, watching the news. This was almost a documentary. It was harder to watch. I lost it again when they showed the news footage of the second plane hitting. I'd been watching TV by that point. I'd seen it the first time. I've seen it since. It still tore me up. At one point, I sort of tuned out the movie. It was the part with the fight, near the end. I don't know why I just couldn't focus. Like my brain didn't want to see anymore. I had stopped crying. I felt that numbness that comes after your emotion is all gone. As the plane spiraled down, I started to shiver again, and at the end, I felt a chill I can't even describe. If it is this hard for me, how can people who lost someone, or many someones, how can they watch this? How can they not? I'll spare you my moralizing about the war, the politics, the conspiracy theories that followed, that persist today. As a follow up to my last post, when I saw the terrorists, mass murderers, sitting in the terminal waiting for the flight, I couldn't help but wonder -did they look at the others waiting? What did they see? Were they too filled with hate to see them as humans? Could they rationalize away what they were about to do? Did they see people's spouses, children, parents and friends and tell themselves it was okay to kill them? When a person reaches the point that innocents around them are nothing by accidental damage, there is no soul left, you are the one who is no longer human. I'll go back to lighter posts tomorrow. But for tonight, ask yourself - how can this be?