I don't remember the time, exactly; the whole day blurred into one long raw smear of confusion and dismay. But the planes came over my house one after the other, as everything was grounded. Silence the rest of the day. One lone jet droning overhead in circles when night fell. In this part of town you're happy when the planes stop, but on that day it was like the pause right before something else hits, hard.
Slate has a piece on the first victim of 9/11: one of the architects of the medium that would explode in the next few hours, and prove that TV wasn't enough anymore.
If such a thing happened today, by the way, it would be up on YouTube in HD in minutes, with hundreds of different angles. There would be footage from trapped people, uploaded from phones. May we never get to see what the 9/11 attack would be like through social media - and not just because reddit would be full of looping GIFs of planes going into buildings.
An homage to the aftermath.
