On the morning of 9/11, I was a Washington-based national correspondent for the CBS national news network. I was covering a lot of health care at the time I remember being in Boston at Mass General, we were doing a story we had to be at the E.R. at seven o'clock and we were wrapping up when we saw on the monitors all of the Emergency Room staff began looking at the television. 

I remember feeling annoyed, what is everybody watching? And then my producer says, "Wyatt, two planes have struck the World Trade Center in Manhattan and one just crashed into the Pentagon, we have to go. Your mind wanted to say this had to be an accident. That was my first reflex and then i realized this is extremely serious, we do need to leave.

We're not that far from Manhattan, but we need to go. CBS news was a New York-based operation and dozens of my colleagues were getting up from their desks um in our headquarters on 57th Street in Manhattan and going toward the Twin Towers and several of my colleagues from CBS to this day have are fighting off various levels of permanent damage to their lungs and I have several friends who suffer lung damage to this day. I think we should all still feel impacted by 9/11 in a very fundamental way. 

We have to remember that right now in this country we cannot convince tens of millions of our fellow citizens that a physical attack on a sitting Congress while Congress was doing its electoral duty is a danger to our country or to our democracy. And the reason we can't convince um those tens of millions of Americans is because they don't agree they have been fed a different set of facts.

Contrast that to 9/11, where there was no dispute about the facts, there's nothing the United States cannot do there's no obstacle too great and no problem that we can't solve when we share the same set of facts and agree on the information but on 9/11 there was no "left" America there was no "right" America there were no left-right cable TV stations. 

There was no dispute about what had happened, that feeling of national unity what we needed to do next how can we help each other that thread in our character still exists and we need to find that again.