Age of terror, age of illusions

Robert Sibley writes - in the Ottawa Citizen - something that I also feel: a great anger (God forgive me)

toward the intellectuals of our time, the cosmopolitans and sophists who, unwittingly or not, contributed to all that destruction through their sophisticated hostility towards the mores and traditions of western civilization.

He talks about watching people jump from the burning buildings of the Word Trade Center

I still see bodies falling. Standing at my hotel window, overlooking Ground Zero, it's not hard to visualize the flaming towers and the bird-like figures of human bodies plummeting through the air. I especially remember a couple leaping hand in hand into emptiness. In their flapping clothes they looked like big clumsy birds, desperate to fly.

There were others, of course. Dozens. According to one estimate, some 200 people jumped from the North and South Towers in the hour-and-a-half the buildings remained standing after the planes hit the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Clerks and executives, cooks and waiters, patrons and clients; they leaped in a continuous stream from the four sides of the buildings, from the office windows of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading firm, from the Windows on the World restaurant that occupied the 106th and 107th floors, from the offices of the insurance company Marsh & McLennan. Writer Tom Junod, in a recent article in Esquire magazine, described the jumpers in heartbreaking imagery: "They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when ceilings fell and the floors collapse; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died."

Some clearly hoped they wouldn't die. They used drapes and tablecloths as parachutes. It did no good. The force of falling tore the makeshift parachutes from their hands. And so they fell, bodies arcing and wheeling and tumbling through space, dropping at an ever-increasing a rate of 9.8 metres per second. In the 10 seconds or so it took to reach the ground they were moving at more than 200 km/h. At that speed their clothes were shredded and stripped from their bodies.

...

I return to my chair and the book I had been reading -- Samuel Dill's Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire. At the time, Christianity was displacing the old pagan religion and the empire was under frequent attack from barbarians. The great weakness, though, as Dill recounts, was the empire's effete elites. He describes the period as a time when the ruling class -- politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, artists -- were cocooned in lifestyle luxury, unwilling to respond to the barbarian threat on the borders. "This self-centred contentment with the material pleasures of life, this rather vacant existence, gliding away in ease and luxury, and a round of trivial social engagements ... is the real reproach against the character of the upper class of that age ... Faith in the stability of the Empire and Roman culture is perfectly untroubled. There is not a hint of those dim hordes, already mustering for their advance ..." It was, Dill concludes, an "age of illusions."

A long read, but defintely worth while.