My 9/11

 

Release Date: 2010

Watch Date: March 28, 2023

"In 'My 9/11,' National Geographic revisits that day with a collection of powerful, immersive stories of people who were intricately associated with and impacted by the event: people in the highest echelons attempting to prevent and stop the attacks; ordinary people caught in the middle, like the window washer cleaning the windows of the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center just moments before the attack; and people who still cannot shake how the events of that morning altered their worlds forever."

    Bob is not only a Puerto Rican, he's an American, and he's not only an American, he's a New Yorker, which, if he's to believed is a very special type of American, unique and quite possibly better than others? I mean he spent the latter half of his time in Kansas, so maybe he has the ability to compare which I do not? Who knows. He's proud of being from New York.

    One thing that being proud of from New York, or just being from New York in general seems to net you, is an ability to own the trauma of 9/11. There's nothing wrong with that. 9/11 may have happened to the earth as a whole and America specifically, but it truly, properly, happened to New York. The wounds are there. The trauma is there. The New Yorkers that were alive during that time period were forever changed by the events of the day, no matter how closely connected to it they were. There is no shame in it, and I judge no one by it. It was a serious tragedy, and one that I only watched grumpily while eating oatmeal safely in a townhouse on the west coast of Canada. I cannot relate to the degree of pain that any Americans, and specifically New Yorkers, faced that day.

    It's documentaries like this though, especially this one, exactly a decade on from the attacks, that give you some idea what it must have been like. And while these stories might seem like old news now, the events of the day gone over and rehashed until you can almost repeat them verbatim, it doesn't take away the sting of watching a plane fly into a building. To seeing the destruction, and people jumping from windows to their deaths because it was probably a better choice than burning alive. It definitely doesn't make me worry any less for the dog - who does survive by the way, thank heaven.

    If you want to really feel the impact of this documentary, and you have the opportunity to watch it with a New Yorker, I would recommend it. There's something...more real, after all the intervening years, about watching it with someone who calls that his hometown. It's harder, it's more vivid. This is a good documentary, and I am sure there will be many, many more on this same subject in our future, but to start, it's not that bad.