On this 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack, I’ve been thinking about time. And about the strange process through which even the most searing events recede into the past. One minute you’re holding your toddler on your lap, looking at the television and trying not to cry as the towers fall; 20 years later, your toddler is a young man who studied 9/11 in school, but doesn’t remember the day itself. When and how did the event that destroyed thousands of lives and changed the world become history?
News, as journalists like to say, is “the first rough draft of history.” But the process of revision never ends. Scrolling back through the TTBOOK archives, you can hear history in the making -- the ongoing conversations of people attempting to comprehend the times we live in. The very first shows we did in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 are stuck in a basement somewhere, on reel-to-reel tape. But by 2006, we were digital, and on the fifth anniversary of the attack, we were talking about an emergent generation of suicide bombers, trying to understand their motivations and beliefs. A decade later, in 2013, we were talking with the generation of US soldiers who went to war after 9/11.
This week, in “Is War Ever Worth It?” we decided to take a literal look back at 9/11, through some iconic images, from the celebrated war photographer James Nachtwey, who was in New York, camera in hand, as the World Trade Center towers fell. And from writer David Shields, who combed through hundreds of front page photos from The New York Times of the wars that followed. We may not get to change history, but the story of the past is something we construct together, through memory, imagination, and compassion. We are with you, revising, re-interpreting, and always, looking for meaning.
–Anne