I was watching the History Channel's new documentary, 102 Minutes That Changed America last night. The film puts together amateur video & audio in chronological order to tell the story of the attacks on the World Trade Center. In one video, a man talks about how he was supposed to have been on the 38th floor of one of the towers, but he was 15 minutes late for work because he was up late the previous night watching Monday Night Football. Denver beat the New York Giants that night, so who knows how many other people were saved by the pigskin.

Looking back from seven years, a few things struck me:

• So many people expressed relief that the attacks were "early" enough that the towers weren't yet full of workers. The attacks started at 8:45 am. In the Midwest, everyone, even people who work on the web, would be in the office. It's just always funny to me how different the rhythms of East Coast life are compared to those of us in the Midwest.
• There are scenes of chaos and horror videotaped by those who lived around the towers that rarely see the light of day. We're so used to seeing the iconic (god, that's a bad word, but you know what I mean) images of the second plane crashing and the Towers collapsing, but it's frankly shocking to see people jumping, sidewalk planters engulfed in flames and the sheer amount of debris on the ground before the towers came down.
• One of the videographers is a college student who shot the towers from her apartment window three blocks away. As she's watching people jump from the towers, you hear her trying to convince herself that they aren't people. Maybe it's a chair, she says. Even though I know that it's people, even I, seven years later, am so horrified by what people went through that day that I actually caught myself agreeing with her. Maybe it was a chair. Maybe someone used a chair to break a window and it's just a chair. It's not a person, it's just a chair.
• One man interviewed people watching the day unfold in Times Square. It's amazing to hear the anger. People were out for blood. We should bomb the whole Middle East to smithereens. The last seven years have tempered that attitude. It's not surprising, but it is kind of ironic to think that part of the President's unpopularity is due to the fact that he's been successful in preventing another attack on US soil. If something had happened in say, 2005, that would have been it. We wouldn't wring our hands over Iraq, Iran, Gitmo or anything else. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing that we have tempered, questioned and agonized over our response to terrorism, it's just funny how the current administration's success in one area has almost lead to their failure in another.

Anyway, the documentary was absolutely riveting and I strongly suggest that you catch it the next time the History Channel replays it (as an aside, it occurs to me that 9/11 is so the History's Channel's Hitler for the 2000's, isn't it?).