You Need to Watch "102 Minutes That Changed America"

As Jane mentioned in her earlier post, the History Channel has added an encore presentation of this amazing documentary in response to the tremendous audience feedback. Do not miss it. It is nothing less than riveting and so skillfully put-together. Please visit the interactive map on The History Channel's website to more fully explore the background of the footage included in the special; it's fascinating.

Even more impressive is the fact that this encore presentation will also be without commercial interruption, as was the initial broadcast. You're a class act, History Channel.

102 Minutes That Changed America

To mark the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on America, the History channel aired (for the first time) an amazing documentary last night called "102 Minutes that Changed America". If you missed it, please try to catch the encore presentation this coming Sunday at 8pm on the History Channel. They are also offering the DVD for sale if you go to the History website.

What made this special unique is that it recreated the events of 9-11 in NYC in real time, piecing together mostly amateur video, from the time the first plane hit the towers to the time the second tower collapsed. Hard to believe, even 7 years later, that it only took 102 minutes for the tallest buildings in the world to be reduced to a steaming pile of rubble.

The most incredible and (to me) uplifting take-away from this documentary, if a word such as "uplifting" could even be used to describe this dark day, is the absolute resilience and bravery of the people of NYC in the face of apocalypse. I always wondered why so few people were killed when those behemoth structures collapsed, and now I know. It was because of the hundreds of NYPD and FDNY workers pleading, yelling, begging everyone to keep moving and get out of the way. For once, stubborn New Yorkers complied, in a way that was orderly and incredibly not chaotic. And while thousands of people ran from the scene, hundreds of firefighters marched in the other direction, up into the towers and to their doom. It's strange, but the whole event has always made me think of the line from the movie "Starman" with Jeff Bridges. The alien says to the scientist, "Do you know what we have always loved most about you (Humans)? You are at your very best, when things are at their worst".

This is as real as it gets outside of being in NYC on 9-11-01. There are no official narrators, no posturing pundits. The only dialogue comes from the anguished comments of the regular folks, who, in picking up their home video cameras on a bright blue September morning, ended up recording history for all the world to see.