That were they thinking

Last night on the local PBS station, a two-hour Frontline episode, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, aired. I watched it between pitches of the baseball game, and parts of it were so riveting that I missed several important plays. In addition to hitting most of the points you'd expect -- escapees from the WTC who saw God's hand in their survival, grieving relatives who wanted to know where God's hand was for their loved ones, and the now-predictable montages of smoking ruins set to the strains of Barber's Adagio for Strings -- the show was most interesting when it examined hard questions. To its credit, the show didn't shrink from putting a conservative rabbi on the air who said that you can't credibly claim God saved you from the pit when so many others are mourning people whom God didn't deign to save. And most interestingly of all, the show lingered on the point that is, to me, the most fascinating of all: The choice faced by people on the upper floors to jump to certain death or perish in the smoke and fires. And that image -- which apparently the filmmakers couldn't get the rights to show -- of two people holding hands while they fell to their deaths, a picture that proved that people had not been somehow blown out of the building but were jumping intentionally.

It's that decision to jump from 100 stories up that fascinates me. As a firefighter said in the film by the Naudet brothers titled simply 9/11, the firefighters arriving on the scene were stunned by the fact that things "must be so bad up there that people would rather jump from a hundred stories up" than face the fire and smoke. Of course, no one who was privy to those decisions survived, so we'll never know what was going through their minds, how they could weigh the factors. Talk about fight or flight.

The show was weakened by the filmmakers feeling obliged to make the end of the show somehow uplifting. That's when they brought in Barber and the montage; but that's when they also talked about the two people jumping hand in hand. Somehow the music was supposed to transform the ghastly images and discussion into an uplifting conclusion -- that the will to reach out to one another transcended the evil of the day. I didn't buy it, partly because Barber is so overplayed that I think it dilutes whatever (usually sentimental) point is being made, and partly because I don't think there's much comfort in the gesture. Yes, there's something in it, in one person literally standing on the abyss saying to another "Take my hand and we'll go together." But then they died horribly -- nothing pretty about it. They weren't listening to Barber on the way down; if their brains had the bandwidth to process any sounds, it was their own screams.

Nevertheless, if I put myself in their place -- I've always been terrified of burning to death. If it's up to me, I'm definitely jumping.