Our destiny changed that day and we've see an endless media loop exhausting how many ways that is so.
None of us who saw it can erase the image. But today 1 in 4 in America were not alive then. History and education should be the guardian of the memory.
A piece of the once "angry young man" has stirred in this old boomer, but not perhaps as you might think. To quote Ed Murrow again, "This just might do nobody any good." I'll pick up his next line too, "...some just might accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest..."
A Marine, counsel for the Commandant, a strong man of enduring courage wept and was overwhelmed as he remembered the day the plane struck near his office in the Pentagon.
A brother recalls seeing his twin return to a tower to help with evacuation, minutes before he is lost in the collapse.
A man tells how he saw a video of a woman in flight dropping past the building on the way to her death, he recognized the clothing as that of his wife.
If you've been near radio, television, or a screen you too have no doubt heard more, much more, of the same. It is heart breaking. It is unfiltered tragedy. It is also excessive, and exploitive.
The honest emotion is undeniable. Its expression is painful, horribly painful. But there is a place for it and there are reasons these humans should need dredge up such pain and heartbreak. I don't think that reason is because a network, or media enterprise thinks it should be.
I'm sorry my father is not here to hear me say that. He was also an absolutist on the first amendment and press freedom but was not without his criticism of media's tendency to hype. As a practitioner of the craft I'd bristle and we'd have a good chat.
The attack on Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination,
and before that the end of the Civil War and World War I would draw newspaper attention to those anniversary date, "look- backs."
There may be value in those historic reflections, but what makes the date of the 20th Anniversary any more appropriate or relevant to plumb the history than 6 weeks before that, for example. The hook, is anniversary; 5, 10, 15, 25, 50, until there are no survivors and few alive who endured the history.
There is nothing in the study of history, the psychology of the brain, or compassion for victims that needs to be exercised on an anniversary date. Scholarship is ongoing while media hits get clicks or ratings.
I get the history, the importance of remembering and teaching and understanding, and learning. But for heavens sake we need not put these suffering people through the anguish of loss, and broken hearts so we can put together a television program or pod cast to cash in on and exploit the emotion.
History courses, museums, memorials, family gatherings, tributes, and such is the decent and civilized place for the expressions of those thoughts and feelings.
Making people sit for cameras and then range through hurt and loss seems hurtful, wrong and crass.
This point of view is probably as popular today as it was when I raised in newsrooms and pushed back against such arbitrary enterprises, "back in the day." There was a ghastly triple homicide that local stations and newspapers always trudged out around the anniversary date. Nothing new, no changes, just a replay of gore and sad stories. What's gained?
There have been a couple of pieces in the blizzard of production that attempted to measure how we have changed, and how we have been affected. They were long on analysis and probing and short on the emotional sound bites and forced memories.
On September 10 I was shuttling between Washington and New York. I had meetings near the Towers and at the Pentagon and just across the river. We were working on a nuclear arms project. We were scheduled for a night flight back to Indianapolis, but one of our contacts had been delayed by weather out west. We made plans to fly back to New York, stay in Manhattan and meet him the next day and then shuttle back and take another meeting in Washington. He called to say he was stuck in Chicago and we should reschedule when timing was better. We flew home on the late flight.
I remember a moment walking in New York, the sky was blue and it was a beautiful day, and I made note of how nice it was and how young those on the streets suddenly seemed. On most previous assignments or trips every thing seemed more of a hassle, gritty and the people were less friendly than they were on September 10, or so I remembered.
Several of the tortured souls I saw interviewed in the last week, mentioned what a beautiful fall day September 11 was. Somehow that touched me.
See you down the trail.
