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 healthcare at the time I remember being in boston
at Mass General we were doing a story we had to be at the ER 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 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 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 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.