Mind if I get something off my chest? No? Thanks. You’re such a good listener.

Cinemas across the country have recently begun showing the trailer for “United 93”, a new film which tells the story, in real time, of the ill-fated airliner and the souls aboard it.

Today, as I looked at the local newspaper’s web site, I was shocked to note that the trailer itself is front-page news. Apparently, moviegoers object to being shown things that are unpleasant, even (in fact, especially) when they reflect real events. A lot of people–people who probably didn’t bat an eye at the trailer to “Silence of the Lambs”–are calling the trailer “too disturbing.”

Some further research uncovered that a New York cinema with which I’m somewhat familiar (the Loews Lincoln Square 12) has even pulled the trailer after receiving numerous complaints.

I am somewhat incensed by this, and I’ll tell you why. We live in a world where the entertainment and news media seem to be tripping over each other in a fierce competition to determine who can disgust us the most. Movies and television get more explicit and ratings more permissive with each passing year, it seems. That’s not necessarily bad, but the exploitation of it can be. The media give us what the ratings tell them we want. If traffic engineers followed audience share, they’d design roads to intentionally cause accidents. If there weren’t a demand, traffic wouldn’t back up for miles as other motorists slow down to gawk at the carnage.

We, as a population, have insisted on being provided with more explicit, more repulsive, more disturbing images and situations. With our movie-going dollars and our cable fees and our video rental money, we have screamed, “DISGUST US!”

This trailer does disgust us. It was meant to. It should, because it opens the door to a story of human lives and real people that were wiped out in one violent, catastrophic moment. The trailer is distasteful because the events are distasteful. It is a powerful reminder of what was and is no more, and of why and how that came to be.

I would like to speak openly, for a moment, only to those who have complained about this trailer, voiced objections to its display, or called for its removal from theaters. If you aren’t interested in what this trailer has to say or what it shows you, please feel free to stick your head in the sand and refuse to watch it. If you’ve already seen it and are feeling out of sorts, good. You should be. However, I will thank you to please stop whining, causing trouble, and trying to appoint yourselves as censors and protectors of the general public. By all indications, this is a faithful and accurate retelling of the events of September 11, 2001. It is a story which needs to be told, and which will be told. We lost a lot of good people that day. Some of us would like to remember those people, to honor them and the sacrifice they made. Your griping cheapens that. Shut up.

Thanks. I feel better now.