Take Me Back To September 10

In today's Examiner I look at how some of the upcoming 9/11 retrospectives, as well as movies like United 93 (which Kevin blogged about at Wizbang), can take us back, for a moment, to a September 10 world.

The upcoming five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is certain to bring with it scores of retrospectives, but perhaps none so powerful as the one planned by CNN.com. One way CNN plans to memorialize the anniversary is by offering Internet viewers a replay, in real time, of the day’s events as they were reported on the cable network on Sept. 11, 2001. The replay begins at 8:30 a.m., shortly before the first report of an airplane hitting the first World Trade Center tower, and continues until midnight. ... As powerful as I found “United 93” to be, I can’t even imagine how viewing the actual real-time coverage of that day will affect me. I will be watching, though, at least part of the replay. I will watch because I want to remember what it felt like, if just for a moment, to live in a Sept. 10 world. I want to experience the feeling of utter disbelief that anyone would fly a plane full of innocent people into a building full of thousands just going about their daily jobs. That blissful ignorance I once knew died five years ago.

I go on to talk about how September 11 changed the way we see the world and respond to threats and how that will play in November.

What Americans will have to decide in a couple of months, and again in 2008, is how they want their leaders to react to threats when they become known. Jeff Harrell put it this way: “The question, come election season, is whether we want our leaders to be overly timid and unwilling to commit American force when threats loom, inviting another Sept. 11 or worse, or whether we want them to be overly zealous and run the risk of acting decisively when it may not be absolutely necessary. The obvious answer, of course, is ‘neither,’ but real life doesn’t work like that. It’s going to be one or the other, and we voters have to choose.” Regardless of the ultimate choice voters make, the experience of Sept. 11 will certainly influence that decision.

Please read the rest at the Examiner. Update: The Anchoress remembers 9/11 and writes about what she will do on the anniversary.

Cross-posted at Wizbang.

Comments

[scrapiron]

I'll bet almost everyone remembers exactly where they were on the morning of 9-11-01. I know I was on duty at the local life saving crew and watched some of it happening. We then began to double stock two ambulances so they would be ready to roll if they were needed. Fortunetly for us they decided they had enough rescue workers at the pentagon so we spent the day watching the recovery actions by the nations finest at the pentagon and the NY Fire/Rescue and Police units in NYC..

[Dave Chavez]

I work for the Navy in California, when the Pentagon was struck we all wondered if anyone we knew was in the building when it was struck. We also had people working all over the country at the time who got stuck in all kinds of places when planes wre ordered out of the sky. I think everyone was in p[rayer mode at the time, I know I was.