I just finished watching The Flight that Fought Back, a docudrama about the saga that took place aboard Flight 93, which was crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Interviews with family members of the passengers were intermixed with painstakingly researched reenactments of what most likely took place on the airplane. It is one thing to hear about and read about the heroic actions taken by the passengers against their Islamic terrorist tormentors. It is quite another to get a visual idea by watching the reenactment of the passengers using the aisle drink cart as a battering ram in their effort to gain control of the cockpit. I had the same feeling after watching the movie Titanic. Many times had I read accounts of over a thousand people floating in the water after the ship went down, but the enormity of it never quite clicked with me until it was shown so graphically on screen as the camera panned away from Rose and more and more people began to fill up the screen around her. As a history teacher, I can attest that as long as it is done correctly, visual depictions can be a very powerful aid in helping people to gain a full measure of understanding about an event.
The heroes of Flight 93 deserved this account of their last moments on this earth, and as I mentioned in the previous post, they deserve a much better memorial at their crash site than the one that has been approved; you know, the red Muslim crescent shaped memorial that will honor the killers more than it will the hard-fighting victims? Here is a link to a site that has been set up to spread the word of this travesty, and it spreads the word with a sobering little bit of animation. Check it out.
Good Day to You, Sir
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson
3 comments:
i think the real heroes of the day were on that flight. I am not discounting the firemen or police, but they were doing thier jobs. the folks who lost thier lives in that pennsylvania field, they didnt have to fight, but they did, and although they died that day, they won.
I also watched that film last night. I have watched other documentaries on this subject, but none have been as touching as this one. Getting to know each passenger and what they did that day made it a little more personal. Instead of just being "those 40 people on Flight 93" they became real.
I have also been following the controversy on the Flight 93 memorial and until last night I hadn't made up my mind on how I felt about it. Was it just people overreacting to nothing or not? Today I decided "or not". Are the architects just stupid or.... nope, there is no "or". They are just stupid. I went to your link and e-mailed the National Park Service. I e-mailed (in part) that “there would be no way in hell that any memorial to the holocaust survivors would be allowed to depict, accidentally or not, a swastika so why let that happen here". Maybe someone will read it and realize how insane this is. Probably not. I'll keep my fingers crossed. T
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