The Great Americans, Part I: Todd Beamer (by guest blogger Dorian Davis)

History is made of people.

On September 11th, the media--by and large--cushioned the public, omitting "graphic" footage of the dead and wounded, and played, instead, a perpetual loop of that second plane as it ripped a scar across the World Trade Center. On every channel, the bulwarks of civilization fell down, the city crumbled, like Atlantis, into the East River, and Maureen McGovern sang, "There's got to be a morning after." It played like a disaster movie from the old days of the epic catastrophes, in the 1970s: The Hindenburg. The Poseidon Adventure. But, mostly, The Towering Inferno, a movie--inspired by the construction of the World Trade Center itself--that completed its principle photography on another September 11th, in 1974.

It set in, belatedly, that people died; met the pavement--pulverized, incinerated, dismembered and smashed--or vaporized, completely, among the layers of debris. The remains became molecules that floated around in the oxygen, approaching our noses and mouths, and we inhaled them. Was it brutal? Yes. But, why was it edited? Why was it polished? That sensitivity was a national disservice. The attack was a piece of evil that I didn't understand--in its entirety--until afterward, when survivors started telling stories about human beings. The victims. The heroes. They were people, I thought. They were people. One of them was Todd Beamer, who called a GTE operator--from Flight 93, bound for San Francisco--and said he would take back his hijacked plane, before dropping the phone with the gallant words, "Let's roll."

There were hundreds upon hundreds of similar stories. There were 44 more in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. There were 189 in Washington, D.C. And 2,572 in New York City. In all, there were 2,986 stories on September 11th. And that was from the victims alone. There were millions more stories--each of us had one--about where we were, and what we saw, and who called us to be sure that we were alright, and each of us told our story to our friends, and our friends told our stories to their friends, and all of those stories became woven into one big story--our story, the American Story, from Paul Revere to Todd Beamer.