September 11, 2001.
I was at work in my office building in Arlington, Virginia, with the rest of my co-workers. A year out of college, second year of graduate school.
I heard about the first tower being hit on the radio, listening to DC101. A live performance of “Rockin’ the Suburbs” by Ben Folds on Elliot in the Morning was interrupted with the news from the World Trade Center.
We turned on the television, mesmerized by what we saw. Like so many, we watched the second tower struck on live television at 9:03 am. We did not realize at the time just how extensive the plot was. Or how close it would come to us.
I will never forget one of my co-workers screaming “OH MY GOD!” when she looked out the window and saw a hole in the side of the Pentagon. The side we could see from our office tower.
Our office did the best thing we could think to do at the time: go home. This was no place for us, and the best place we could be was with our families.
I do not take for granted that so many people never got that chance.
I remember driving up Interstate 95 at 105 miles per hour, entirely unconcerned about the police stopping me. The roads were clear. The world had just stopped.
So much has changed in 25 years. So much has not.
We are still subject to the same ridiculous post-9/11 TSA procedures, the security theater you still pay $5.60 a ticket for.
We still have the Department of Homeland Security, the signature piece of post-9/11 legislation. It brought disparate parts of the government together in the name of “efficiency” and “security” and did little more than build the surveillance state. ICE is a part of Homeland Security, you know.
Most of the Patriot Act is still on the books. The mindset it codified, that security justifies watching everyone, gave us the world of Palantir and Flock cameras. The surveillance state is now complete.
One thing we did not lose, however, was our humanity.
Many were concerned in the wake of the attacks that there would be violence against Muslim Americans. Given some of the rhetoric at the time, those concerns were justified. But Muslim Americans have shown that they are as patriotic as any other American. There are still people on the far, far right, best described as fascists, who believe Muslims should be deported or put into camps. But nobody called for Christians to be exiled or arrested or rounded up after Oklahoma City or Waco. Nobody suggested Christians could not be trusted the way the terminally online right says about Muslims today.
Certain people are upset that Zohran Mamdani is mayor of New York City on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. They are even more upset that he is attending today’s memorial service. But why? Mamdani’s policies are terrible, and I don’t agree with them. But the fact that a Muslim could be elected mayor of New York less than a generation after the attacks shows the resiliency of America and the real character of real Americans. We do not hold entire groups accountable for the actions of a radical few.
We do not use national security as an excuse to foment violence against religious or ethnic groups.
That is the version of 9/11 I want my kids to understand, and I still struggle with how to tell them. My eldest knows it happened and knows the basic facts. I haven’t shown her the video of the planes hitting, of people jumping from the towers, of the towers collapsing. We haven’t been to the Flight 93 National Memorial. But it’s important, as with Pearl Harbor, that we never forget what happened that day. The good and the bad.
The heroes who went in while everyone else ran out. The people who dug for weeks for survivors. The people who lined up to donate blood. The people of Gander, Newfoundland. America and our allies coming together.
The tragedy of September 11th remains the nearly 3,000 people murdered that day. But America did not lose what makes it America. That is the real triumph of the last 25 years.
May God remember the victims, and may God continue to bless our country.