Sunday, September 11, 2016

Sept. 11

One pretty cynical thought I remember having on Sept. 11, 2001 was, "I wonder how long it's going to take people to forget this."  Now 15 years past, we have a generation of 20-somethings who were too young at the time to really understand what that day was like.  Today I felt like I found the best way to explain it.


This morning, MSNBC aired an uninterrupted rebroadcast of the Sept. 11 NBC Today show, synchronized to, and played out in real time.  It was a rapid, flailing, chaotic mess of journalism; things the newspeople couldn't make sense of happening faster than they could even describe.  It perfectly captured the feel of the day.  It's a far better retelling than some carefully organized outline of the day's tragedies all laid out with the most descriptive photos and video clips possible.  Gathering that information in such a civil, organized way really misses the point.   Instead, watch it happen in real time, and listen to the words of the people trying, first, to believe their own eyes and then trying to make sense of what they are seeing... as more unprecedented shit continues to unfold. 

And THAT feeling was just part of what Sept. 11th was about.


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