United Airlines Flight 93

For a long time, I've wanted to see the Flight 93 film...It was on the History Channel tonight, and I decided it was time to watch it, having put it off and put it off due to the subject matter...I do not say this lightly, but everyone in this country needs to see that film...

It was extraordinarily well done, very sensitive to the families and friends of passengers...The topic is very violent, but it is not gory or exploitative in any way, shape, or form...It's terrible, because throughout the whole movie, I was really rooting for the passengers...Even though I knew how it ended, I kept thinking: 'Do this! Hit him! Do that! Pull up on the throttle!" As if they could be saved at the last minute by my shouted instructions at the television set...

A friend of mine said re. that flight, that only in America would a plane get hijacked, and everyone just whip out their cell phones...*smile* The thing that really struck me was Lisa Johnson, a customer service supervisor who took over a call from Todd Beamer...Maybe it's just the tiny human brain trying to understand these things by personalizing them, but the initial images of that call, in that bland call center/office atmosphere really hit home...

I saw a documentary some time ago, by two French filmmakers who had intended to do a documentary about a particular fire station in NYC, and just happened to be there on September 11th...This was the first time I really realized what happened when people were jumping from the WTC...Throughout the documentary as the cameraman rushed around the base of the towers, you'd periodically hear this tremendous 'BOOM!'...Literally as loud as a car crash, or one of those pounding machine things they use in road construction...That was a person hitting the pavement...On September 11th, the networks, in a rare show of compassion and discretion, agreed not to show any of the people jumping or falling from the WTC...Afterwards, I tried to imagine the fear and the strength of people joining hands to die together, crossing themselves, the man who attempted to scale the side of the building in search of safety...

And I thought about how 40-odd people realized what was on the line and took action to prevent more horror on that awful day...

I was unemployed in the summer of 2001, and remember waking up briefly that morning with a start, frightened for some reason...I went back to sleep, but it must have been about 8:45 or so, when I got a call from S, telling me that planes had hit the World Trade Center in New York City, and the Pentagon, that there was a truck bomb at the State Department, and at least 2 other planes were in the air in the control of unknown hijackers...Noone knew what was happening...Like everyone else, I turned on the TV...S had more calls to make, to check on another friend whose mother was flying that day...I called my parents...It was still quite early out West, but they had already heard...They were trying to get through to our cousins, whose apartment was about 2 blocks from the Towers...All the phone lines were jammed up, but I managed to get a call through to his sister in Canada, who had heard from them, and they were fine...It's a complete cliche, but that day is just a blur...I talked to my parents again, but there was just nothing to say...

Watching the coverage after the initial hits, an announcer mentioned that a command center for the WTC rescue operation had been set up in the lobby of one of the buildings...I remember thinking (yelling at the TV actually...I do that a lot) that that was really stupid...What if it fell down? About twenty minutes later, it did...

That afternoon, I went to the grocery store...As I stood in line waiting to check out, the man in front of me made some comment to the cashier about the huge line and the $5 a gallon prices at the gas station across the street...Putting my foot in it as usual, my interjection to the effect that '$5 a gallon was nothing, wait until we're at war with these fuckers and then you'll see some gas price hikes' was not well received...

It was so strange to me, watching Flight 93, I can hardly remember what that world was like, before September 11th...The Cold War was over and we had 'won', we were worried about having a President who was not the brightest crayon in the box, but I think most people were just wondering what happened to Aaliyah's plane...Life seems to have come to some sort of new normality, but I wonder what the historical analysis of this time period will be in one hundred years...