Tim Rogers: Images of a lifetime

Published 3:07 am Sunday, March 13, 2011

Good morning.

There are images that occur throughout our lives that remain fixed in our minds forever. They are the memories that cause us to smile or wipe away a tear at rare moments when we sneak back into our past.

For most of us, they are a combination of personal moments — a first date, a first kiss, what our spouse looked like on our wedding, our first glimpse of a newborn child — and more public events that we share with others.

Ask anyone who is old enough to remember Dec. 7, 1941, and they likely can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. For them, it is an event that will not fade with time because it changed our world forever.

The same is true of the Kennedy assassination, the landing on the moon and most recently, the attacks of 9/11.

I can remember almost everything about Sept. 11, 2001. I know where I was when I first heard the news that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers, I don’t have to look at a photo to remind me of what it looked like when the first tower started to collapse and I can remember calling Deb to tell her what had happened, only to learn that she and other moms in our neighborhood had gathered to watch what was going on in New York, Washington, D.C., and in the skies above Pennsylvania.

If 9/11 happened today, far more of us might likely learn about it from a text or Facebook message, and YouTube videos would be as widely watched as CNN, Fox News or any of the big three networks.

I have been thinking about all of this over the last 24 hours as I have watched the unbelievable images that have been coming out of Japan.

I first learned of the earthquake and resulting tsunami when I woke up Friday morning and was listening to National Public Radio on my way to Dalton Middle School for its career day. I had a bundle of papers and my laptop with me and was planning on telling the kids about what it is like to be a journalist and what skills you need if you were interested in becoming one.

Upon arriving at the Middle School, I tapped into CNN.com to see what I could learn about the earthquake. What I found was a host of video and pictures that had already been uploaded from Japan and I quickly realized that I had the perfect teaching moment for journalism at my disposal. Not only could I show the students our paper and what we cover locally, I could also show them history as it was unfolding.

As they strolled by my table Friday morning, many of the kids did stop to look at the videos and the images. A lot of them had already heard what had happened, but most had not seen any pictures from it.

Like me, they had never seen a wall of water just sweep across the countryside picking up everything in its path.

Right now, these images are at the top of our minds because we feel for the victims of this enormous natural disaster. We can’t imagine having to swallow an iodine pill because radiation might be leaking from the nuclear power plant just down the highway. We can’t fathom having to dig through a mile of mud and debris to find the spot where our house used to stand.

What happens in Japan will have an effect on us all and we are just at the beginning of learning this.

But for most of us, these images, like the tide, will recede. They will be replaced by the next big story in our lives.

As I watched the middle schoolers watching the videos, however, I couldn’t help but wonder if these images will become part of the permanent memory of at least one of these students.

Who knows, watching what happened 9,000 miles away may help spur one of them to want to travel to Japan or become involved in disaster relief.

I don’t have any real reason to remember the assassination of Anwar Sadat. It was a big news event in 1981, but it didn’t mean much to me at the time. I can remember as clear as day, however, delivering the paper that carried the news of his death, because I thought how amazing it was that The Chapel Hill News had the story so quickly after it happened.

I have always thought that memory is one of the reasons that I gravitated toward journalism when I graduated from college.

All of us have images that we carry around with us and that have had an influence on our lives, both for ill and for good.

These days, it’s a big world that is drawn closer every day by the technology that allows us to see — in real time — the disasters and celebrations of everyday people all across the globe.

I can’t help but wonder if a lifetime image was left with a student at Dalton Middle School Friday.

Tim Rogers is editor of The Daily Citizen. He can be reached at timrogers@daltoncitizen.com.