Never Forget

I remember the sheets of paper the most.

From the roof of my Brooklyn Heights apartment
building, the scene was certainly surreal: Entire vertical
columns made up of millions of sheets of paper rising a
half-mile high from lower Manhattan and raining down
across the East River into my neighborhood streets.

The heat — which, I was told later, was generated by
the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings on Sept.
11, 2001 — had sent office papers flying. I watched as the
buildings fell a little over a mile from where I stood, and
later watched as fire trucks and ambulances from Brooklyn
were called in to help with the devastation.

I had spent much of my career up to that point walking
through the World Trade Center buildings. Each morning
at 7:30 a.m. for nearly 10 years, I bought a bagel and coffee
from the same lady at the same coffee shop in 2 WTC on my way to work
as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Liberty chairman John Malone
and I shot the breeze on a concrete bench in between WTC 1 and WTC
2 one morning in 2000.

Sept. 11 was, as Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav
said before a screening of The Rising: Rebuilding Ground
Zero last week, personal for everyone, even if you were not
personally affected by its events. We all remember where
we were when it happened. All Americans were affected.

As upsetting as those real-life images were for me, I was
touched most by what I saw on TV. The first responders
who sacrificed their lives. The stories of survivors and families.
The spontaneous heroes.

Looking back is hard sometimes. I haven’t had much of an
appetite for any video from 9/11 since the days immediately
after. Too painful. But in the hands of skilled filmmakers,
shows such as The Rising, National Geographic Channel’s
George W. Bush: The 9/11 Interview and Showtime’s The Love
We Make documentary with Paul McCartney, make it easier.

Approaching the 10th anniversary, this week’s cover story
highlights cable’s efforts to commemorate the victims of the attacks
on 9/11, and the lives of the people who are irrevocably tied to that day.
What more appropriate screen to reconnect to our collective loss? Images
of that day were viewed for the first time on TV — not an iPad, or
a BlackBerry or a cell phone. Tune in.