9/11 “Boatlift” - History is Memory

History is remembering. Whether it’s the product of living through events, facts learned in the classroom, a book imparting a scholar’s research, or the wartime experiences of a father or grandfather passed down in a family, memories create a shared as well as a personal past. The same is true for a country.

Where were you when…? On December 7th when Mutual, NBC, and CBS radio interrupted their scheduled football, drama, and panel discussions to report the attack on Pearl Harbor; on November 22, when Walter Cronkite replaced the CBS soaps with the breaking news that President Kennedy was shot; on September 11th when TV screens around the world displayed the chaos and collapse of the Twin Towers.

Month and day are enough. Each generation has its answers. More often than not, they’re powerfully shaped by the news media’s words, images, and iconography; a sunken battleship, a casket carried down the Capitol steps, smoke rising over Manhattan’s mountain of rubble and twisted steel. Their text, pictures, film, video, and voice have comprised, as the cliché goes, history’s first draft forever. Until today.

When it comes to the news, of course, the reasons why are obvious. The changes in the business and what it delivers are hardly a secret: driven by technology, the media’s fracturing has doomed an information ecosystem where readers, listeners, and viewers at a minimum shared a picture of what happened, albeit -- and not surprisingly for American and other democratic cultures -- often disagreeing on why.

Here, too, however, the common forum was crucial. What ensued forced the debaters not only to face each other, but also the same facts. The national inventory of fools, fanatics, and fabricators still generated their flat earths filled with conspiracies. But the fringes notwithstanding, most news consumers occupied the media’s commons, not the partisan playpens that characterize broadcast, cable, and online news today.

In an election, not to mention a decade, where silos define the media’s landscape and lies are permanently embedded in the political lexicon, the consequences for democracy are playing out in real time. So, too, are the effects of the images accompanying the rhetoric. Consider today’s candidates, one, fist upraised over a grimace, the other, a radiant smile. The pictures speak volumes more than any words.

That’s why Boatlift deserves attention. Few today remember the speeches on 9/11, but its images are central to the nation’s memory. The Boatlift’s video should be the same. It tells a story as powerful as the scenes of destruction, but with a different message. It’s no less part of our history than the patriotic rhetoric that raised spirits or the vows from all political sides to avenge the attack.

Even as the disaster’s smoke shrouded the chaos, tugs, ferries, and tour boats, all volunteers, arrived on lower Manhattan’s shore where tens of thousands, massing on the waterside, had fled the destruction. A single Coast Guard radio call rallied hundreds more boats of all sizes to create a flotilla that rescued a half million people in a matter of hours.

In both speed and numbers, the boat lift dwarfed Dunkirk, Great Britain’s stored seaborne evacuation of its own and allied forces from Nazi Germany’s military clutches in May 1940. And yet, in the history of 9/11 it’s at best a footnote. In the collective memory, it’s barely that.

Boatlift isn’t about warriors rallying, vengeance, or the high politics that produced the global war on terror. It’s about an extraordinary expression of a very ordinary aspect of the American character: the capacity to rally together to help each other, no matter who is in need, without orders, and with the creativity that has marked the nation for 250 years.

At a time when the media’s messages reflect the political season’s divisiveness, 2024’s remembrance of 9/11 today could remind Americans -- and add to their collective memory -- by featuring Boatlift as a story of what they can do. It’s a history that needs viewing again.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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