TV sears images into our heads on a daily basis. The fires in Texas with the victims standing in the ashes of their lives, fighting back tears, holding some small remnant in their hands. The floods in Pennsylvania with people being rescued by rowboats from the homes they’ve lived in for years, because the rivers have crested over their neighborhoods and destroyed everything, leaving only new rivers of muddy water behind. The babies dying of starvation in Somalia and Kenya with their skeletal mothers fanning the flies from their faces and harried medical people trying to save who they can. The aftermath of car bombings throughout Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya with women keening and children crying and men carrying torn-up bloodied bodies on makeshift stretchers in search of help as sirens wail and fires burn.

Yet when we turn on the tube, that’s not what we want to see–the horror and the carnage and the disasters both man-made and natural. We are usually looking for entertainment and escape–an absorbing drama, an hilarious sit-com, a compelling reality show, a surprising talent competition. We want to have a passive experience of relaxation and simple, undemanding fun. That’s what TV is for–to immerse us in languid enjoyment, like a cat sunning on a windowsill, watching the occasional bird or squirrel. Effortless and for the most part, meaningless.

But it’s those other images that stay with us–the ones where TV takes us somewhere we would rather not be, like the perimeter of those fires, or wading in the flood waters, or wondering if that baby is going to die right before our eyes.

Ten years ago we were all watching TV at the same time, watching one of the most declarative scenes of this decade, the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath, watching something we never wanted to see, never thought we’d see, wished we weren’t seeing.

But there it was, on our TVs, inescapable and horrifying in a way we really couldn’t comprehend, because it was new and different. We’ve seen the fires before, and the floods. We’ve seen the starving babies and the grieving mothers. We’ve seen the burned out cars and the shooting flames and the bits of bloodied flesh.

But we had never seen anything like this. And we couldn’t look away. This was the accident right in front of us that included all of us and we had to bear witness to it. And TV made us do that, even as it helped us through it.

I had considered ignoring this 9/11 anniversary altogether–just writing about more of the new season that is starting up over the next two weeks because some of the shows are really good and some are edgy and some are just going to give you that nice, soporific glow that fun TV is all about. I had considered retaining the editorial “we” that I have used in this space for 18 years, but realized I could not do that for this column, because for each of us, this remains both deeply personal and also compellingly collective.

The past week has been all about commemoration and memorializing and that day when we really were all one nation for just the briefest bit of time. And what made it happen was TV, because it was TV that allowed us to see all the different vantage points of that day.

I worked in New York for years at a series of publications–OutWeek, QW, SPIN, POZ. I also worked for a few publishers and mainstream newspapers for which I did a lot of investigative reporting that took me into parts of New York that most white girls don’t ever see. So New York was one of my special places. I lived there, I worked there, I loved it. I’d been to the top of the World Trade Center and had lunch with friends and stood outside on the very top deck where the wind whipped you like crazy and you could feel the building sway and it was both terrifying and exhilarating.

So on that beautiful, impossibly blue skied Tuesday morning, when the tour of the morning shows was going on, it was hard to believe what any of us was seeing. Diane Sawyer–then the host of ABC’s “GMA”–trying to ascertain what was going on. Then the second plane hit. And then it was just non-stop TV for days, because everything else ceased and you could barely stand to look away, because somehow watching TV all through the day and night and day again made you feel connected to those people in New York and that experience and what it meant to all of us.

We needed to hear those anchors as they got increasingly tired and tried not to cry and jackets came off and ties got loosened and sleeves got rolled up and suddenly we were all together in the same place–the news anchors, the street reporters of which I had been one for so many years, the witnesses. As a nation, as an audience, we were sharing this incomparable moment where we really didn’t know if our country was going to go on or not. Because none of us had ever experienced an attack on us before. That was something that happened someplace else, not here.

Seeing the planes going into the buildings over and over never seemed to lessen the eerie unreality of it all. If anything these TV images heightened our sense that something was just so awry, so wrong. We were in an episode of “Fringe” and had gone through the portal into the other world. We were watching a movie like “Tora, Tora, Tora,” or “Apocalypse Now” where the planes fly in low and fire erupts out of impossible places.

Except it was indeed real and there were the TV news people to tell us how real it was and all the things it could mean and we were just so scared and yet it was soothing to know that we could go lie down for a time, or maybe eat something, and come back and turn the TV on and they would all still be there. Holding our hands through this ungodly, ghastly, unreal time.

On that day and in the next days after, it was TV that made us feel the most safe. Because it was there, non-stop, unending, a running commentary that was almost blissfully mundane in how it explicated and deconstructed this awful event.

A decade ago I wrote here about that day and how it was TV’s finest moment, keeping us grounded and sane and soothed. For those of us who had little faith in government, we were able to have faith in TV: the news was there, evolving the story along with us, talking about the same kind of feelings we felt and why–the anger, the sadness, the confusion, the pain, the impotence. It was all there. Because the news people were Americans like us, fearful like us, hurt and appalled and shattered like us. But they also had a job to do and it took a specific kind of bravery to do that for days on end with no respite.

So this week, when the images came flooding back with some of the same people retelling the story, when they showed it all to us again–the planes, the buildings collapsing, the people standing in line with bits of DNA of loved ones, the postings of photos of the missing, the audio-tapes of the last moments and the air-traffic control people and the first responders–it was as vivid as if it had just happened.

I wasn’t sure how much of it I could listen to, actually. I’ve never understood the madness of killing innocents–or of thinking innocents are collectively guilty. I’ve never stopped being sad and angry about that day and all it has led to–the massive amount of killing that has peppered our TV news with blood over the ensuing decade, but which has not shown us a hint of resolution to either the carnage of that day or the carnage of our attempts at avenging it.

Scott Pelley, the new news anchor at CBS, was a reporter until he became the anchor. He has a lot of the embittered battle-weary tough guy about him. On the Sept. 9 evening broadcast he got a glimpse of the new memorial to the victims that was to be unveiled on the anniversary.

I’d seen a lot already in the 9/11 anniversary lead-up–interviews with the families of the dead and with first responders remembering that day. Diane Sawyer did an almost unbearably moving piece on her Sept. 9 broadcast with the children of fathers who were killed on 9/11–fathers these kids, who were born after their fathers had died, had never known. The segment ended with pictures of the kids next to pictures of the fathers and to a one–girl or boy–they looked exactly like their dead parent. Gut-wrenching.

But it was Pelley in a hard-hat, looking out over this remarkable, breath-taking memorial that reduced me to literal sobbing of the sort I had not done since that day ten years ago.

There is incomparable beauty in simplicity and this is the most simple of memorials. But that implies rudimentary or limited and it is neither. There is a wall of water and two empty spaces replicating where the towers would have been. The names of the dead are engraved behind the water and the water spills out in this ghostly fashion into the spaces that are open and empty, and the feeling of absence that the designer wanted to convey is all-too apparent. It absolutely takes your breath away.

The tributes have been many and varied and heart-breaking as only memories of loss can be. But I suppose what lingers for me as a one-time New Yorker and a reporter and a TV critic is this: What hasn’t been memorialized or paid tribute to over the last week or more has been those news anchors and reporters who in the literal minutes and then days (because remember, all TV programming was suspended on the networks for several days after 9/11) after the attacks kept us from freaking out and running amok and doing damage to ourselves and others. They kept us in front of our TVs with their calm, soothing, professional voices. Some broke down–the late Peter Jennings, talking about his kids, Dan Rather, having a moment of sheer disbelief, Tom Brokaw, posing questions for which there would never be answers. But they all hung in, they all pulled it together, they all sat there for hour after hour and made us believe that we really would get through this–that we actually could get through this. They made us feel like what had been shattered could be made whole again if we just kept remembering that we had more in common than we had dividing us and really–it worked, because with only a few highly individual exceptions, we didn’t go crazy as a nation. Instead we stayed home and watched the tube and tried to breathe.

That’s what TV is supposed to do for us in these moments that could so easily destroy us as a country: help us keep it together.

And so I wanted to pay tribute to those people who helped me and millions of other Americans get through those days to this one ten years later. There’s a lot to find fault with in our TV news media and I spend a lot of time in this space criticizing what doesn’t work about TV and where it is wanting for so many of us.

But that 9/11 reportage was a watershed moment and everyone stepped up to the challenge with a level of humanity that isn’t usually what we think of when we think of the tube. It was stark and raw and ad lib and Teleprompter-free and that’s what we needed. It was unscripted reality TV of the most devastating sort and I–and we all should–feel so grateful that we had it and that it helped to get us to where we are now. So that in the memorializing of this decade we can look at that monument to absence and know that we didn’t contribute more to the carnage, we didn’t run amok and terrorize and burn down cities and pull people from their houses. We stayed sane, even as we felt crazy. And if we hadn’t had TV and the men and women news people on it to keep us calm, to demand that we be calm, perhaps things would have been hellish from the minutes after the planes struck until today, as you read this.

For the most part this column is a paean to TV. I have said time and again in my “we” voice that I love TV, because I do. I love its immediacy and I also like being entertained in an undemanding manner. I am frequently frustrated by the news we’re not seeing, and if I have one complaint about the 9/11 tributes beyond how many tissues I have gone through in watching it, it is this: 9/11 led us directly into two wars–three if we count Pakistan, and I do–that we are still in a decade later. (And yes, I know Iraq was not about 9/11, but its architects linked that war to the attacks and a lot of TV news bought that and ran with it for years.)

The 3,000 people who were killed on 9/11 have been joined by thousands more–our own American soldiers and a huge cohort of Afghanistani, Iraqi and Pakistani civilians as well as soldiers.

That’s the part of the memorializing that’s been left out of the coverage, except it’s inextricably bound to it. The victims of 9/11 led inexorably to so many more victims, the numbers of which continue to mount.

TV has a job to do. It can create controversies where none really exist, like Chaz Bono joining “Dancing with the Stars” as the fattest contestant ever. (Oh wait, that’s not the controversy, never mind.) Or it can explore meaningful issues like the growing number of Americans dealing with hunger, as an ABC series has been investigating in vivid detail. Or it can bring us characters very like ourselves, like Bianca Montgomery, the longest-running queer character ever on the tube who leaves ABC next week when “All My Children” airs its final episodes after more than four decades. Or it can stand our elected or hoping-to-be-elected politicians up there and open them for examination.

TV has such an amazing range and we are so fortunate to have it. But as the commemoration of 9/11 starts to fade even as new fears of attacks are raised, what we should remember about TV is this: Nothing can bring us together as either nations or humanity in the way TV can. Its immediacy takes us right there–wherever right there is. And for a time we will all be right there on that sparklingly beautiful September morning, because just as TV helps us to see today, it also doesn’t let us forget yesterday.

Which is just one of the many reasons we really must be sure to stay tuned.

Since last Friday I have been navigating the health care system–an arduous and expensive and frustrating process that clarifies all over again the desperate need for a working and workable and affordable health care system.

But that is not my complaint–at least not today.

When you are sitting around in a hospital moving from waiting room to waiting room, you see a lot of TV. This week the news remained focused on the aftermath of the Ft. Hood shootings, including interviews with the police officers who ended Maj. Nidal Hasan’s rampage, interviews with Hasan’s Imam, interviews with families of the victims and a plethora of reports on just how many different people sent up red flags about Hasan well in advance of his alleged attack on Ft. Hood–and just how many times those warning signs were disregarded. (When an Army psychiatrist has his business cards printed up with “Soldier of Allah” on them but no mention of his position in the U.S. military, how much more do you need to know? Really?)

President Obama’s speech at the memorial service underscored the pain and suffering. Eulogies are inevitably poignant and Obama has ever been a forceful and emotive speaker. He was no less so at the memorial.

As Obama spoke to the massive crowd at Ft. Hood, the camera panned over the soldiers and one man stood holding an infant. The soldier, in fatigues, was facing the President. The baby, over his shoulder, was facing the camera. A smiling baby smacking his father’s back playfully, unaware of why they were there together on this bright, sunny Texas day. Far too young to comprehend tragedy.