This is a long download but an important file to take the time to listen to and watch. There are a few pieces I would have wished to do differently in terms of the choices, but the actual footage and the music is valuable.
For myself, I finally watched United flight 93 which I have been unable to handle watching until this year. It also is very worth the time. I was speechless by the end. My distinguished friend and co-worker the Rev. Craige Borrett saw United 93 in the theatre and noted that it was the only time he has ever been to a movie where the people left in total silence–KSH.
It is so very American that when we [i]finally[/i] started to fight back — after 22 years of repeated attacks — it was civilians who took things into their own hands, even though they most certainly would have preferred to have been in other circumstances. Many of the prattling idiots in Congress should be grateful for their lives, but don’t bet on it.
As I write this, it is a cool, rainy morning here in central Ohio unlike that beautiful, warm sunny Tuesday in 2001. I was attending a workshop by Stephen Covey when we got word of the attacks. Being a senior director of a state agency at that time, we were called back to the office and then eventually sent home.
I remember being disappointed with Covey because he continued his workshop as if nothing had happened, even when it was very clear at that point that something terrible had happened (there were TVs outside the conference hall showing the video images that are now no longer available to the public).
Today looks very much like that other Tuesday and this afternoon, as I was then, I am alone. I couldn’t watch the news on TV, I spent the afternoon refreshing the AJC website, which had dispensed with graphics to bring constant updates. A friend in California happened to be online looking for news, too, and we kept each other company. I remember how glad I felt when it was announced that all planes were down, all flights grounded. And I remember how strange it was for months afterward to see so few jet streams across the sky. My grandmother had fallen and broken her hip a week earlier. The very next weekend, we took my mom to stay with her for a week – it was incredibly hard to leave her! But I will never forget that trip. At one overpass, a man stood high, waving a flag at the Interstate traffic below. On the backroads, all the houses seemed to be draped in flags.
Headphones on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqGJ7_T9SI4
That was very good, midwestnorwegian. Thanks.
I have not been able to watch Flight 93 as my classmate was captain of Flight 77 that went into the Pentagon. But the only movie I have ever seen an audience leave in silence was Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” (on Good Friday, no less).