The Headline, One Year Later

by Bruce Schimmel

It was a headline that said it all, a sentiment at the heart of everything else being uttered at the time about the events of Sept. 11.

“Nothing Will Ever Be the Same” was the simple phrase that dominated the front page of the edition of the City Paper that was published two days after the attack. Plain words, simple and true.

And CP can say, however immodestly, that our colleagues in the news business agreed with our assessment. Of all the phrases on all the front pages of thousands of newspapers, the National Press Club reproduced City Paper's cover, with those six simple words, in the center of a commemorative poster that featured only 24 other newspaper covers worldwide.

I wasn't in the newsroom at the birthing of this headline. But I'm told that other headlines were also being considered. The runner-up, which read something like "Jesus Fucking Christ," was indeed an excellent description of our collective state of mind at the time. It was undeniably snappy and true. But it offered little more than the right words for our unspeakable shock.

"Nothing Will Ever Be the Same" was better, because it went beyond merely expressing the horror of the moment. It challenged us to ask and begin to answer the bigger question of "What's next?"

The headline, in white, appeared to be stenciled over a dark red image of the towers still engulfed in flames, minutes before their eventual fall. These words were a prediction that after the World Trade Center tumbled, the old center of our lives as citizens, our lives as people, would not hold.

No belief, discomforting or comforting, would ever be the same.

The belief that terrorism would not touch American lives.

That the American people were fundamentally selfish.

That the ordinary heroism of everyday people had died, killed by the media.

And while all our beliefs have fallen or shifted, perhaps tectonically, the bedrock of our convictions remains surprisingly still the same. What has not changed is our capacity to question authority.

For as much as we are asked to view these events as the Big War, even the most ardent patriots look askance at the black and white world projected by the administration and promulgated by the media: that this is the fundamental battle between good and evil.

For though what was done to us was evil, it does not necessarily follow that we are good.

Our skepticism of the powers that be may have taken a brief hiatus. But our questioning ways are back and, though changed, are roaring even louder than before.