C-SPAN’s Post-9/11 Calls Will Make You Tear Up

Of course, I meant to post this a couple months ago, but my schedule hasn’t been so kind lately. I wanted to make sure I gave it the care and attention it deserves. I understand we live in the age of Tweets, but I don’t know about you guys, but I miss the age when people wrote multi-paragraph blog entries in order to give context to fleeting thoughts!

When I wrote about working on an empathy-powered project, a C-SPAN podcast I recently heard (ok–maybe not so recent b/c it was back in September) pretty much embodies my thinking. [Link to clip from the show—forward to 1:50.] When you listen to it (preferably with headphones for added effect), you are swiftly transported back to the morning of September 12, 2001. There is no script that’s being followed here. It’s just a bunch of average people—mostly New Yorkers and Jersey commuters—who just 24 hours earlier were unfortunately trapped in the middle of the 9/11 attacks, and now alive to talk about it the morning after.

For most, the call was akin to a public therapy session which allowed them to release the pressure that had built up over the past day. You can hear it in their voices. It’s very tangible. It gives you goosebumps and makes your eyes well up from long-forgotten emotions from that day. I could notice my heart rate increasing with certain calls (the podcast I heard was 45 mins long, so you might have to find it on C-SPAN’s various podcast offerings). The callers were itching to tell someone—anyone—and it turns out, the perfect medium to do so was an old-school style call-in show on C-SPAN. It allowed callers to speak their mind, without interruption or dramatic banter for lucrative sound bites you might hear on other cable news networks.

The visceral effect produced by listening to unedited audio can be felt physically and emotionally. It makes you want to hear more. You want to ask a million follow-up questions but don’t because you want to keep listening. You want to find out how these people are doing today, but you try to not think about it because you don’t to miss anything they are saying on their call. It’s an exercise in listening–living through another person’s experience from a very tragic day.

As I listened to this podcast, all the Afghanistan pull-out drama was also playing out in the news at the same time and it set the stage for somewhat awkward questions for those with inquiring minds. I was left asking myself how different a similarly produced show would be in Afghanistan or Iraq following post-9/11 invasions featuring average Afghanis and Iraqis.

I hate to admit it, but the simple answer is that it would probably play out very similarly. Callers would spend majority of the time describing the horrible scene they just witnessed and then proceed to pose the most pressing question of all: what could compel anyone to do something like this to people they don’t know?

For anyone who is interested in launching a popular podcast, follow this recipe:

• _{1 part anonymous host (you can reveal your first name, but preferably it will be a fake one).}
• _{99 part voices of average people in the place you live—regardless of whether it is Palmyra, Syria or Easley, South Carolina}.

Now, why in the world would anyone want to listen to average people questioned by an anonymous host? Sounds like a podcast version of watching paint dry. If you were in the position to green light the next big podcast, this would probably be at the bottom of the list. Having said that, people have a lot of time to waste these days and listening to average people talk is better than reading the extremes of society duke it out on social media.

Undoubtedly, this is the perfect show for a world that feeds on social media influencers living out their 15 minutes of fame. This show will feed on real, unedited stories of average people, who happen to be living through a critical time in their personal histories.

Ok, maybe that was more context than most of you were expecting, but then again, in the golden age of quick bursts of information, that shouldn’t be surprising at all! Viva multi-paragraph blog posts!