9/11 victims America wants to forget

I recently came across photographs I had taken of paintings that a friend created after 9/11 in 2001. The topic he focused on was very disturbing. They were of people falling out of the towers! They were what I vaguely remember as labeled the "Jumpers" Each 9/11 anniversary, I like to write about something out of the ordinary in relation to 9/11, then and now. So I did a Google search. I discovered this article in the British paper Daily Mail:

"The 9/11 victims America wants to forget: The 200 Jumpers who Flung Themselves From the Twin Towers Who Have Been Airbrushed Hrom History"
By Tom Leonard updated: 06:01 EDT, 11 September 2011

This tells the whole story as to why we have never heard much about these so called "jumpers", why the media relegated them to a vague footnote in the 9/11 history.

He writes: "Images of the falling bodies disturbed and appalled all who saw them. On the first anniversary of the tragedy, an exhibition showing a work called Tumbling Woman, a bronze sculpture by artist Eric Fischl, lasted just a week in New York's Rockefeller Centre before it was closed following protests and even bomb threats."

"Nothing more graphically spells out the horror of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers than the grainy pictures of those poor souls frozen in mid-air as they fell to their deaths, tumbling in all manner of positions, after choosing to escape the suffocating smoke and dust, the flames and the steel-bending heat in the highest floors of the World Trade Centre."

"If this was simply down to qualms at being considered intrusive or voyeuristic when individuals in the most appalling circumstances chose in desperation to die very publicly, it would be understandable. But there are other, more complicated, reasons. In the aftermath of this attack on America's sovereign territory, a period of intense patriotism, some considered that to choose to die rather than be killed showed a lack of courage. Many believe that to be a "jumper" was to choose suicide rather than accept the fate of God and suicide in whatever circumstances is considered shameful or, indeed, a sin that will send you to Hell".
"At the office of the New York chief medical examiner, a spokesman said this week that they did not consider these people jumpers. She insisted they fell from the 1,350ft tall, 110-floor skyscrapers, for jumping would imply suicide. Jumping indicates a choice, and these people did not have that choice, she said. That is why the deaths were ruled homicide, because the actions of other people caused them to die. The force of explosion and the fire behind them forced them out of the windows.
Unofficial estimates put the number of jumpers at around 200, but it is impossible to say for certain because their bodies were indistinguishable from others after the collapse of the Towers."

So 23 years later they have just become a footnote to history! How sad, when thousands of others who perished are remembered, enshrined and given acknowledgment that they indeed died that day in that horrible tragedy.