Charlie Sykes

I didn’t believe it was really a terrorist attack until the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

Who can ever forget where they were or the shock of that moment? The sheer world-rocking horror. I was standing in the programming office at the radio station, watching the image on television, a notebook in my hand, filled with possible show topics for a world that had just been obliterated in a ball of fire and smoke.

Who can forget how the events rolled out that morning; as tragedy mounted on tragedy; rumors multiplied; the fear, the uncertainty (how many planes?); and the realization that we had been attacked, that this was our own Pearl Harbor?

That did not seem an exaggeration that morning as we scrambled to understand what the attack meant: how many people were in those towers? How many Americans might die? Had that many Americans ever died in a single day of war?

My generation lived through the Kennedy assassination and the explosion of the Challenger. But this was what our parents saw on December 7, 1941… except we saw it in real time. We saw people dying. We knew others would die within minutes.

Even as it was unfolding, we knew that this was a pivotal moment, one of those dividing lines of time where everything that comes after assumes a new shape and a new meaning. Sometimes we only recognize epochal shifts after the fact: but five years ago we recognized it as it happened.

I remember being impressed by the professionalism of the journalists around me; the way they separated any personal feelings from the need to carefully and accurately report the day’s extraordinary events. They knew what was required of them and they delivered; and in those early hours, those first few days, that was what we saw throughout the country.

Terrorists intend to terrify. But Americans weren’t terrified. They were angry and they were determined. And they did their duty. If the terrorists had thought the country would descend immediately into panic and hand-wringing, they were disappointed. But I think Americans were also surprised by the America that responded that day. It was an America we had forgotten about: the firefighters, the cops, the rescue workers… a whole new generation of heroes for a country that had come to think that it didn’t need heroes, that heroes were passé, too macho, too chauvinistic.

For a moment, it really did bring us together.

Of course, it didn’t last. On my show, I talk a lot about America’s short attention span, but I have to admit that on September 11, even I couldn’t have envisioned Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, or the surging, poisonous anti-Bush hatred of the coming years.

Before September 11, 2001, we had spent a decade sleep-walking through history, so maybe it shouldn’t have been surprising that so many Americans were so quick to embrace the emotional comfort of denial and amnesia. But this is an anniversary that can’t be denied or forgotten; even five years later it still feels raw, the images still shock, the memories are still fresh, and the threat remains a daily reality.

Everything is different. On this day, five years ago, everything changed.