- Thursday, May 3, 1:30-2:30pm @ The Bowers Museum (Santa Ana) – “Global History of the Chinese Typewriter” [Event Website here]

- Thursday, May 3, 4:00-6:00pm @ UC Irvine – Lecture on the Chinese Typewriter [Details here]

- Friday, May 4, 12:00 noon @ The Huntington Library – “How the Typewriter Changed Chinese (and Chinese Change it Right Back)” [Event Website here]

DETAILS

RACE AND ETHNICITY IN EAST ASIA
(HIST 295F | HIST 395F | ASNAMST 295F) 
Professor Thomas S. Mullaney
Fall 2011
Tuesday 2:15-4:05 
Building 110 Classroom 114
GER: DB-SocSci

Please visit here for all the information, and see below for the abstract:

Thomas S. Mullaney

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took place on September 11, 2001. Throughout the country, moments of silence were observed to commemorate those who lost their lives on that day, and to reflect individually on the momentous changes that were then set in motion. Among the many hundreds of ceremonies that were scheduled, a certain latitude was afforded in terms of when such moments of silence were to be observed. In the official ceremony in New York city, two moments were chosen: 8:46am EST, being the moment when American Airlines flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex; and 9:03am EST, when United Airlines flight 175 struck the South Tower. Elsewhere in the United States, different moments were selected. In Seattle, the radio station KZOK observed a first moment of silence commemorating the fall of the South Tower at 6:59am PST (9:59am EST); and a second moment of silence commemorating the fall of the North Tower at 7:28am PST (10:28am EST). Still other moments were adopted elsewhere, as in the Parkway Schools system in Missouri. Unable to commemorate 9/11 with students over the weekend, District Superintendent Keith Marty requested that a moment of silence be observed this past Friday. Giving leeway to school administrators, he requested only “that the remembrance take place Friday between 8:46 and 10:03am since it marks the times when terrorists crashed a first airplane, American Airlines Flight 11, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, and when the final plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed into a Pennsylvania field after passengers foiled terrorists’ hijacking plans.” In each of these commemorations, and in every commemoration that took place, the selection of these moments of silence carried immense symbolic weight, with some emphasizing the events that set this terrible day in motion, others those moments in which the fury of the day reached its apogee, and still others attempting to give a complete embrace of the day, in all its temporal and geographic scope. Each of these decisions was freighted with significance, insofar as they implicitly posed – and then explicitly answered – the following question:

When was 9/11?

That few pose such a question outright makes a great deal of sense. When spelled out like this, the question seems jarring, even callous. It is a question whose answer is so clear, that in the simple act of posing it, it would seem as if some offense is meant. But when reflected upon more deeply, it not only tumbles one further into the numbingly painful confusion of the past, but also reveals a basic truth about life that I, for one, had never considered before. And so, in this essay – which is necessarily a first draft, as will become clear – I want to reflect on those moments of silence that, while they will not be collectively observed, in many ways capture more honestly the moments when 9/11 happened for the great majority of people.

Sometime after 11am

In my world, September the eleventh did not happen at 8:46 or 9:03. Neither did it happen at 9:59 or 10:28. In my timeline – that wholly selfish historical timeline which is significant to oneself alone – my 9/11 started a little beyond 11am, almost three hours after the real 9/11 had begun. It started when my heard my best friend’s voice utter:

What do you mean, Tom? They’re gone.

Andy was speaking to me on his cell phone, during his long, northward walk from downtown to our Upper West Side apartment – near Columbia University, where I was in the second year of graduate school in Chinese history. Around 10am, I arrived at Kent Hall having showered and shaved, but without having turned on my television set. In my first teaching assistantship, with a renowned China specialist whose name graced the cover of our textbooks, I arrived at the lecture hall, where my fellow T.A. and a handful of undergrads were already beginning to convene. Before I set down my bag, I was told that the Pentagon had just been attacked. I reacted as if to a garbled sentence, asking my colleague to repeat himself. My mind turned to impossible images, fictional images, from the movie Red Dawn, I think it was. Nothing I had heard made any sense, and the next ten minutes were spent asking questions whose answers seemed to disappear from my consciousness as soon as they entered. Once, when I was younger and played baseball, I suffered a concussion sliding into home. I was trying to beat an in-the-park homerun, and as I slid, my helmet popped off. Landing sharply, my neck snapped back, cracking my skull against the well-trodden, packed dirt. From what I learned later, I sat there in a stupor asking “Was I safe? Did I score?” And then, again, “Did I score? Was I safe?” No matter how many times my parents assured me, I kept asking. And so it was in Kent Hall, asking “The Pentagon? The World Trade Center?” And, again, “The World Trade Center? The Pentagon?”

In a decision that still surprises me to this day, class was not dismissed. In my more generous moments, I attribute it to the WWII background of the professor, who had lived through times like this, and saw it partly as his duty in his later years to instill a sense of calm and continuity within younger generations, all while hoping that we would never have to witness the things he had.

After class was let out, I proceeded down the stairs, and into the East Asian library on the first floor of the same building. There all of the computers were occupied, each opened to one or another news site. Over a colleague’s shoulder, I saw my very first image of the day: a photograph of the towers, one of which had long, twisting threads of smoke peeling towards the sky. I decided to head back to my apartment, about 20 minutes away, carrying that image, continuing to make failed phone calls along the way. I reached home and, without turning on the television, began listening to voicemails. One came from Andy, who explained that he had evacuated his downtown office and was walking home. I called him back and caught him on his cell. And this was the moment when 9/11 happened for me: Andy was somewhat out of breath, with a distant and concerned cadence to his voice. And I said this, and will never forget that I did:

I saw a photo and it looks like there’s damage to the top of one of the buildings. With some smoke coming out. Looks like it’s all right besides that, though.

What do you mean, Tom? Andy responded. They’re gone.

It was at that point when, like countless millions of people in the United States and abroad, I turned on the television and commenced my full, unrelenting, vivid, and terrible introduction to the real timeline of September Eleventh, where I would watch United Airlines Flight 175 evaporate into a flaming incision. That is when my personal timeline unraveled completely, and when I began to be woven into the real events of the day.

Somewhere in the Confusion that Followed

As I reflect further, I’m not sure this is entirely the truth – that my 9/11 can be anchored so clearly to that one phone call, as startling as it was. Perhaps the truth is that 9/11 happened some time over the ensuing two months, during those strange sixty days. In the Fall of 2001, I had not been a resident of New York for more than a year. I still knew very little about the city, especially since my workload kept me on campus most days. One of the things I had noticed, however, was the unparalleled ability of New Yorkers to perfectly distribute their lines-of-sight on crowded subway cars, each person selecting a point upon which to fix their gaze such that eye contact was entirely avoided. I soon came to appreciate just how much solitude one could enjoy in New York, despite the magnitude of its population, and this was one of the reasons why. By distributing these lines-of-sight, one could stand no more than three inches from everyone, and yet still be free to dwell in a solitary universe of private thought. No one seemed to be thinking of, looking at, or otherwise conscious of the same thing, almost ever.

Between September 12 and late November, however, this was no longer true, and it was haunting. For those sixty days, entire cars of people seemed to be synchronized – 15-year-old skaters with dyed purple hair, septuagenarian Russian grandmothers, Williamsburg hipsters all seemed to be peering through the subway floor at the same distant point. Starting on September 12, and lasting for the next two months, everyone seemed to have the same thing on their minds. And it was a terribly unsettling thing, seeing groups of New Yorkers all sharing the same thought, if only because the sight of it reinforced just how deep was the hurt. It cut straight through that famous, salty east coast individualism, and enfolded everyone. For two long months, this was the aquarium in which we were all swimming. 9/11 formed the edifice upon which the ivy of individual experience clung and climbed, to the point where it seemed that everything – everything – had to do with it. The tone of this period has been captured only once, in my opinion, in what stands as the only true 9/11 movie to date: Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. Here was a story that, precisely because it had nothing to do with 9/11, was the only film that had everything to do with it. All other screenwriters and directors have failed because they foolishly attempted to capture the essence of something whose essence cannot captured when approached directly. In many ways, 9/11 was the feeling of walking to the bar with a group of friends, sensing the two memorial beams of light out of the corner of one’s eye, and then ordering a drink as if it were just any Saturday night.

Sometime in the Dark Years

Anyone who lived through the period of late 2001 to early 2003 knows it to have been one of almost constant disequilibrium. Every week, it seemed, I heard of another friend or long-time acquaintance – people I knew, or thought I knew – making some major life change. I heard of a boy I knew from middle school, now a grown man, who joined the army. This didn’t surprise me so much, as I remembered him as rough, tall, and bearded even as a pre-teen – genetically ahead of his time. But I also heard the same story about a young man I knew from my freshman year of college. And never in a thousand years would I have imagined him a soldier. Still now, I remember him as deeply fragile and pale and awkward, and harmlessly neurotic in his own, Born-Again way. And yet, there it was: he was a solider now. What is my value? What is the value of my labor? Does my being here add anything to this life? These were the questions that all of these people were confronting. I felt it, too, wondering if I should abandon the study of China for my original passion, Arabic. Should I quit grad school and join? Should I join the foreign service? The operative question was always should.

Other friends changed their lives in ways that, while also genotypically connected to 9/11, manifested themselves in the form of romantic breakdown. A dear friend of mine told me about her partner of many years, a man she was readying to marry, who suddenly fell into some sort of engrossing confusion after 9/11. And as a result, a once loving relationship declined rapidly into something quite different, and eventually into something that wasn’t at all.

It’s hard to say when this period of darkness began, but some part of me dates it to the first appearance in New York of those awful trinkets: Twin Tower t-shirts, 9/11 snow globes, infomercials featuring small American flags attachable to car antennae. Gradually at first, then suddenly, those two months of collective confusion and anguish came to be replaced – no, betrayed – by this loose cabal of callous, tacky, conniving profiteers. Was that 9/11? Is that when it happened? I reject this idea out of hand, and yet the events that followed – particularly the lead-up to war, in its all its shifting legitimations – refused to let this terrible thought subside.

In Lost Time

In August of 2006, I moved from New York to San Francisco. Having finished my PhD, I joined the History department at Stanford University, where I teach today. During the first two years in particular, I had left my heart in New York – Brooklyn in particular – putting an unfamiliar twist on the more commonly invoked lyrics. I made it a point to travel back east on a yearly basis, and became attached to the idea of being in New York each September 11th. Some part of this was connected to the fear of a second attack, timed to the anniversary. If something happens, God forbid, I thought, I want to be there - whatever that might mean. Thanks to the late start of the academic year at Stanford, this was possible, and so for a few years I managed to make it happen. But eventually, as I learned to surrender a bit more into my new home, these trips became more and more infrequent, until finally I found myself sitting in my shared apartment in the Mission on September 11, 2008.

I decided to revisit 2001 by watching Youtube clips of the television broadcasts from seven years prior. I watched the flames again, and I watched the towers fall again. Distance of time seemed to matter little, as if these images had exclusive access to my innermost sentiments. But the distance ultimately did permit me to see things that I hadn’t noticed in 2001, nor in the sixth intervening anniversaries. I reviewed CNN and NBC broadcasts from the day, watching footage of flight 175 and of the collapse of the South Tower. In each, my eyes fluttered between the images and the clock in the lower border of the screen, preparing myself for what I imagined must have been tragic outbursts at precisely 9:03 and 9:59am. I had never seen the original footage, and so I imagined something like a public, on-air breakdown, a shocking exclamation. Sitting there in the quiet of the living room, with my earbuds in and the laptop pulled up close to my waste, I heard and saw nothing of the sort. I saw something entirely different.

The first video I watched was the CNN broadcast showing United Airlines Flight 175 as it struck the South Tower. Bookending the moment of 9:03 was an exchange between the broadcaster and an eyewitness named Winston. They were discussing American Airlines Flight 11, and the North Tower, and were co-creating a sophisticated and highly plausible explanation of what may have happened. The host was leading the conversation in certain ways, and yet the makeshift narrative that emerged was authored by both men. Their conversation went as follows:

HOST: Did it appear that the plane was having any difficulty flying?

WINSTON: Yes it did. It was teetering back and forth, wing tip to wing tip. All of a sudden, it smashed right dead into the center of the World Trade Center. Um, big flash of flame, fire coming out from all over, then all of the bricks, there’s a huge hole right now. It almost looks like the plane probably went through, I’m not sure.

HOST: Winston, can you see… are you on the north side there where the plane made contact?

WINSTON: Yes, I am.

HOST: Now when you say a huge hole, one of our earlier witnesses Libby Clark said not much of the plane came down off the building. Much of it went into…

WINSTON: No, it went totally into the building.

HOST: It’s in the building from what you can see.

WINSTON: Right

HOST: Now can you see if there’s a lot of debris downstairs, Winston?

WINSTON: No because it looks like it’s inverted. With the impact, everything went inside the building.

HOST: Inside.

WINSTON: The only thing that came out was a little bit of the outside awning. … Let me just get a better look right now.

HOST: Ok go ahead.

WINSTON: I’d say the hole takes about… [UA FLIGHT 175 STRIKES] it’s like six or seven floors were taken out. [Note: Winston's voice remains calm, and he has not seen the plane; neither has the announcer. There is a break in the CNN broadcast signal, which is the clearest indication of the impact - it is roughly 4.7 seconds later when the host next speaks]

HOST: O, hold on just a moment, we have an explosion inside.

WINSTON: THE BUILDING’S EXPLODING RIGHT NOW! YOU HAVE PEOPLE RUNNING UP THE STREET. Hold I’ll tell you what’s going on.

HOST: OK, just put Winston on pause for a moment.

WINSTON: THE WHOLE BUILDING JUST EXPLODED. The whole top part the building’s still intact. People are running up the street. Am I still connected?

HOST: Winton, this would support probably what Libby and you both… that perhaps the fuselage was in the building that would cause a second explosion such as that.

WINSTON: That’s what happened, then.

I paused the video in shock. They didn’t see the plane. They didn’t see it. Watching the footage in my living room, an entirely different side of the day began to come clear, which reminded me painfully of how it felt to live through that day. I began to see that many had not noticed, even among those whose cameras were trained upon the towers. Reviewing the day in 2008, I knew what to expect out of the right side of my screen, and at precisely what moment. But the host of course did not, and neither did Winston. But what was more important was the way that, in the absence of this knowledge, they had instantaneously developed a ten-second, placeholder reality: a fully plausible, detailed, evidenced narrative that, at least at that moment, fully captured and contained something so momentous and unthinkable as a new sphere of flame emanating from the tower. It was the secondary explosion of the fuselage of Flight 11, still lodged in the North Tower, they had concluded. There was nothing added to qualify this statement, to pose this narrative as a potential, unverified explanation. This was, for those ten long seconds, reality as these two men had co-authored it. Quickly, of course, the timeline was overwhelmed and dissolved and proven unreal. It was not really the fuselage of the first plane that had exploded. It was something so much worse. And by 9:05, 9:06, or perhaps 9:07am, both Winston and the broadcaster began to know this, each beginning the process of re-weaving a narrative to try and contain this newly unfolding chaos and confusion.

HOST: That… that certainly looks… (Pause) We are getting word that, perhaps…

WINSTON: Ok, hold on! The people here are… everybody’s panicking

HOST: All right, Winston? y’know, Winston, let me put Winston on hold for just a moment.

WINSTON: Ok, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be staying. I’m inside of a diner right now.

HOST: Well, Winston, y’know what, if you could give us a call back. I just don’t want to panic here on the air. Let’s just take some of our pictures from News Chopper 7.

However, for those 10 long seconds between Winston’s confirmation (“That’s what happened, then.”) and the brute force reality that something in this story did not hold (“Everybody’s panicking!”), this makeshift, fragile, yet remarkably precise and scientific narrative was there, and made these images explainable to themselves and an entire viewing audience. I would venture to say that, while this fleeting, microhistorical narrative was quickly forgotten by anyone watching CNN that day – and perhaps was not even committed to memory in the first place – the same would not be true for this eyewitness and this broadcaster. This is pure speculation, of course, and yet it seems so likely to be true: at some point in the ten long years that have separated us from 9/11/01, one of these two men quite likely recounted the story of this ten-second, temporary reality, either to himself or to someone else. And while such a story would no doubt have been framed in the context of a misunderstanding – “When x happened I thought it was y, but I was wrong.” – inside their hearts this story would take on a decidedly different tone: as something that was true and real, and then was taken away.

Ten-second realities like this one can be found scattered throughout footage from the day, tucked inside the folds and corners and interstices.

When I watched footage of the first collapse, the same microscopic pattern was there. I listened to Tom Brokaw and his colleagues, and paid close attention to the clock at the bottom of the screen – which, for me, might as well have been counting backwards to 9:59. But 9:59 came and passed without remark. Even with the NBC camera trained unflinchingly on the devastating moment, no one saw the tower fall.

9:58am

TOM BROKAW: We also ought to remind everyone once again. This is an exceptional development. The FAA has banned all take-offs at all airports across America. This country in terms of air travel has been immobilized. A good portion of the nations’ capital the most powerful center in the world has been immobilized as well as a result of these terrorist attacks.

WOMAN: And that’s a very haunting description that Bob Kerr just gave of that low flying aircraft near the White House and one can only wonder if that was something that ultimately [9:59am Voice is heard saying “Let’s go back.”] ended up in the pentagon.

9:59am

GUY: ‘Scu, we just saw live picture of what seem to be a portion of the building falling away from the World Trade Center. If we can rerack that to about 20 seconds ago you’ll see something dramatic happening and, I don’t whether it’s another explosion or a portion of the building falling away, but something major just happened at that building.

WOMAN: Ok.

GUY: Now watch what happens in the left-hand tower. (Pause) I don’t know if this is the correct take. (Pause) There. Something there is about to happen. Falling away right there.

BROKAW: Yea, it looks like a big chunk of it has just peeled away.

WOMAN: One can only hope that the area has been evacuated but of course you wonder about all the emergency vehicles and the people who might have been injured early in the morning.

10:00am

BROKAW: Well you remember when the bomb went off in the basement of it in 1993 how much damage was done throughout that building. How much chaos there was at that time. These are two coordinated airplane attacks on the building, on the upper reaches of it. That will have an enormous structural effect. Those buildings, I think that it’s fair to say, will probably have to be brought down. It’s too early to speculate on that, but there’s been that kind of damage to it.

Just as CNN and Winston created a fleeting, 10-second reality approximately one hour earlier, once again we hear and see another being co-authored by Tom Brokaw and his colleagues. A full minute after the tower had collapsed – after it was already gone – Brokaw spoke of structural damage, of not wishing to speculate on whether the towers might need to be taken down at some point in the future, of a piece of the tower falling away. Suddenly, memories of that first moment of my own private 9/11 pushed to the front of my mind. What do you mean, Tom? I wanted to ask. It’s already gone.

There must have been thousands of millions of ten-second realities that day, forming rapidly, and collapsing just as rapidly, bubbling as in a glass of soda water. Like the story of the fuselage, they would have all been equally plausible, sophisticated, and supported by evidence. Indeed, nothing short of the complete intelligence of each of our inner historians would have been tasked to developing these ten-second realities – so how could they be anything less than coherent and brilliant? Unlike the story of the fuselage, however, the overwhelming majority of these ten-second realities would have left no trace of their existence, arising and dissipating without so much as an utterance, and certainly not being imprinted on paper or committed to film. These fleeting realities would not even have enjoyed the relative stability of shared, collective memories, insofar as each was born, lived, and died in the mind of an individual, with its entire life-cycle taking only a matter of moments. This dense cloud of overruled realities are retained solely in individual memory and, again, can only be recounted to others in a form of narration that fails to capture them, and in fact does them terrible injustice. None of us are really able to recount our ten-second realities the way they were – as real – because we learned so very soon that they were not.

Over and Over Again

As I continued to watch footage there in my living room, another memory of 9/11 returned, and this was the memory of repetition – the simple but easily overlooked fact that, for those of us who experienced 9/11 through their television sets, none of these horrific moments took place just once. They happened repeatedly. Rewinding the CNN broadcast, I began to take notes. 9:07am marked the first moment when the footage of the second plane was rebroadcast. This was the second time that the plane struck the tower – not in real real life, but in the real enough life of those watching television at the time. And for anyone who came to their television sets just then, it may have been the first: the first time that they watched the plane strike in their world. This first replay was followed in quick succession by the second (9:10am), the third (9:12am), and the fourth (9:13am). The fifth replay (9:16am) became a first of another sort: the first replay in which the moment of impact was digitally enhanced – rendered even more vivid and more terrible and more precise. More amenable to exact narration. Within this fifth replay, the forward advance of the plane was frozen just prior to impact. We were close to the plane itself, granulated and ghost-like. The sixth replay (9:17am) marked another turning point: the moment when broadcasters, and perhaps people in general, began to speak over top of the images without making any direct reference to the them at all. As the plane struck now for the seventh time – once in real life, six more times in enhanced life – broadcasters were in the middle of thanking one eye witness, Ira Furman, and introducing another, Todd Harris. They did not stop to watch the event, but just kept on going. In just 10 minutes from the first replay, the images were already being, as much as they could be in their terror, pushed into a background, to give more room for narration and interpretation. It was almost as if the images were becoming familiar, although this is an interpretation that haunts me – that I naturally want to reject, but cannot, as I consider it so many years later. The seventh replay (9:19am) witnessed the first inclusion of graphics, with a small, superimposed, pale translucent circle now enfolding and tracking the plane (although it would be hard to imagine any viewer whose eyes would not be trained upon this point without such assistance). And so, in less than 15 minutes, CNN viewers across the world watched the second plane strike seven more times.

The rhythm and tone established within these first few minutes came to define televised reenaactments over the coming hours, days, and weeks. New footage was uncovered and presented. New angles. New graphics. The second plane struck the World Trade Center over and over and over again. The towers fell, not once, but hundreds if not thousands of times on my television that first week alone. Nevertheless, in the midst of this tight, revolving repetition of imagery, at 9:23am, the CNN broadcaster announced the time-of-day in which (he thought) public memory would come to fix this moment: ’8:48am’. Yet even this was inaccurate. As we now know, the true moment of silence is 8:46. This would become one of our collectively observed moments of silence. And yet, for those who experienced 9/11 through our television sets – the vast majority – any one of these dozens of replays constituted the moment when, in the quiet of their individual lives, they unconsciously fixed a point upon their own timeline, thereby fixing the moment that, with each anniversary, one would be most likely to recall and observe. Asking again, when was 9/11, it would seem that there is another possible answer: 9/11 happened in any number of these hundred-fold reenactments, or perhaps more likely, somewhere in the confusion of their unceasing repetition on that terrible day.

Any Time, Day or Night

Ten years have passed since that day, and so much has changed. Andy married Salley, also one of my very best friends, and together they started a beautiful family. My friend whose relationship dissolved after 9/11 went on to meet the true love of her life. I wrote a book, survived the first five years on my way to tenure review, started a band, watched it collapse, started another, watched it thrive, dated, broke up, dated again, and finally met the love of my life (who is sitting near me on the couch as I write this, giving me the support and encouragement finally to set these thoughts down). In other words, it’s been 10 years like any other, at least in terms of the natural density and fragmentedness of life. Yet, through all of this, 9/11 has continued to function as a sort of latticework or internal structure to these experiences in some ineffable way. It continues to be a brick wall to the ivy of experience, the aquarium in which I and a good many of my friends still swim. And if ever too much time passes before I realize this, something happens – something unexpected – that places me back in New York, back in 2001. It might be an unexpected scene in a movie – here I am thinking of the brilliant documentary Man on Wire which, in the midst of the ebullience of high-wire daredevilry, suddenly presents an image of the protagonist lying on his back upon the wire, above him extending not only the Twin Towers, but also a lone commercial jet passing overhead. So much time had passed, and yet I almost had to leave the theater. Or it might happen on a late-morning stroll with Andy, Salley and their baby daughter in our old college town of Baltimore. Passing through the Inner Harbor, and taking notice of the World Trade Center complex there, a few passing remarks we made to each other were overheard by a young boy, no older than 6 or 7. Holding onto his mother’s hand, he casually and sweetly interrupted us with a matter-of-fact statement:

There’s a World Trade Center in New York, too.

Without saying a word, Andy, Salley and I all began to think the exact same thought: How sad. He’s too young to know.

After about five steps, the young boy craned his head back towards us, and with a cavalier shrug of his shoulders, added:

Well, there used to be.

There is, of course, no answer to the question that guides this essay. Not in terms of a specific time and date, at least. Instead, it seems that only a general set of parameters will do. To that end, I find the following instructions, issued as guidelines to emergency responders, to be the best answer one could hope for:

This is (fill in the blank) requesting a moment of radio silence in honor of those individuals, both sworn and civilian, who made the ultimate sacrifice during the attack on America, ten years ago today.

After an appropriate period of silence, sound another tone followed by:

This channel is now returned to normal operation. May they rest in peace.

It has been requested that a coordinated effort be made to broadcast this message at 0959 hours EDT on Sunday 9/11. However, both the format of the message and the time chosen to broadcast it remain open as local options. If you have your own message, and another time is more convenient, please proceed accordingly.

The length of the moment of silence is also left to the discretion of localities. Obviously, even for such a somber event, emergency traffic takes precedence, and may interrupt or truncate the observance.

The most important thing is that you participate in whatever format you can.