They were called “jumpers” or “the jumpers,” as though they represented a new lemminglike class.
It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, “We’re in uncharted waters now.”
For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself.
One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced.
In the most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world, the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo — the only images from which Americans were proud to avert their eyes.
Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness — because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.
The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away.
