The voices of 9/11 are still speaking to America today

I was hoping to come across “Hoarders” as I channel-surfed on Sunday morning through the endless loop of 9/11 anniversary programs.

I’d had enough of being forced to remember; of the ambient anxiety that accompanied, for me, last week’s relentless attention to one of the darkest moments in our nation’s history.

I wanted a mindless reprieve, permission to trash that pile of newspapers with 9/11 articles — fatherless children, wounded soldiers, unhealed communities — that I couldn’t bring myself to read.

But I was ambushed by a documentary on the A&E network, which carries the series “Hoarders.” I saw precisely what I didn’t want to see: images from Sept. 11, 2001, of horrified and confused New Yorkers trying to absorb what they had just seen.

They had no idea at that moment of the magnitude of the tragedy: A plane crashing into a skyscraper was a deadly, but somehow manageable, calamity.

What I saw tapped into the best, and worst, of those early-morning memories.

• The emergency dispatchers trying to comfort panicked callers trapped by flames, when all they had to offer was “Sit tight. Stay low to the floor. The firefighters are on their way.”

• The young firefighter biting his lip, trying not to cry, as bodies fell from the burning tower. He flinched when a body landed near his feet, then hoisted a hose and headed toward the inferno.

• The mother watching from her apartment window but trying to keep her young daughter from knowing. “What’s going on, Mommy?” “Nothing, baby. Everything is OK. Just go back and lay down.” She turned back to the window. When blue sky suddenly appeared where the south tower used to be, I could hear her choking back sobs.

As the hours went on, those stunned New Yorkers moved from confusion to shock to anger to fear — not so different from the journey that our nation has taken.

And they tried that morning to comprehend it — just as we have tried to do during this landmark anniversary weekend.

“With my own eyes, I saw the entire event,” one Manhattan hotel guest insisted.

He didn’t, of course.

The entire event is still going on. And we — as one nation — are still determined to see it.

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It’s not as if any American can forget that day — the dividing line between then and now; the moment we went from world power to target.

I think about 9/11 every time I have to take my shoes off at an airport, scan my security badge in the office lobby, peel off the green sticker that reseals letters addressed to me but opened first in a mail room still worried about anthrax.

But beyond those inconveniences, there’s a collective obligation to remember and a national need to memorialize.

On Sunday, the 10th anniversary, there was something for everyone in Los Angeles, from flying flags and country music to food donations and blood drives; from prayer services and memorial walks to volunteer recruitment at local malls.

Still, it’s easy to be cynical about our commitment to the lessons of 9/11 on the other 364 days of the year.

Osama bin Laden is finally dead, and for a few moments, a few months back, that made us feel victorious. But that was quickly subsumed by politics and the ugly realities of two drawn-out and ongoing wars.

And there are things to be disappointed about. We didn’t hold on to the spirit of cooperation that was born from the horror of 9/11. We’ve made costly accommodations as our world shifted. Security became more important than freedom, suspicion central to survival.

We lost our sense of invincibility but have yet to make our peace with the requirements of vulnerability.

But we do, I believe, recognize that it will take more than one day or one week of unified remembrance to remedy the ailments of a nation awash right now in uncivil discourse and fractured by ideological rifts.

We may not all assign the same message to that life-changing event. But the ways we came together last weekend pay tribute not just to those who died 10 years ago but to our evolving identity.

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If the television documentary forced me to look, the radio forced me to listen:

The gravelly voice of Richard Pecorella, describing the loss of his fiancée, who was at work in the World Trade Center. Her name was Karen. He still loves her, thinks about her every day, has dinner with her family every Sunday night. “Her eyes sparkled to me,” he said. “One day they were blue; the next day they were green.”

I was driving when I heard it on NPR and had to pull over to the curb and sob.

I may not have the stomach for victim stories, but the voices of survivors pull me in. They convince us that life goes on despite our loss and pain; not easily, and not ever the same.

The vignette I heard was part of an oral history project called StoryCorps, which began in 2003 as a sort of traveling confessional that goes around the country collecting stories.

Right now, the website features dozens of stories from people linked to the World Trade Center attacks: the Army sergeant whose soldier-wife was killed disarming a roadside bomb on a mission he had ordered; the young man who wouldn’t let his mother watch the news that day, because he was sure his father was dead.

But it’s not a forum just for tragedy and loss; it’s a collection of ordinary voices, talking about the everyday stuff of life.

Two nuns discussing their passion for baseball; a woman expressing forgiveness to the man who murdered her son; a man acknowledging his struggle with encroaching Alzheimer’s.

I listened late into the night on Sunday; it was an antidote for all that troubled me — a reminder of our need to share, our ability to forgive, the power of stories to preserve our memories.

And the importance of listening.

sandy.banks@latimes.com