Twenty-five years later, the lessons of 9/11 are fading

Today marks 25 years since the morning America changed.

A quarter-century.

That is long enough for September 11, 2001, to have moved from lived experience into history for a growing portion of the country. There are now adults beginning careers, getting married and raising families who were born after the Twin Towers fell. They know 9/11 the way my generation knew Pearl Harbor — through photographs, video, textbooks and stories told by people who were there.

I was 28 years old that morning, stationed in Virginia and sitting in a war systems class when my Marine Corps gunnery sergeant instructor walked in with news from his wife, an ABC Television producer. Something terrible had happened.

Minutes later, he rolled a television into the room.

Together, we watched America come under attack.

We watched smoke pour from the World Trade Center. We watched the towers burn and fall. We learned about the Pentagon and, later, about the passengers and crew of Flight 93. An ordinary Tuesday morning became history before our eyes.

And those of us wearing the uniform understood something almost immediately: Our lives had just changed.

America was at war.

Twenty-five years later, I wonder whether we have done a good enough job explaining to those who came after us not simply what happened that morning, but why it happened — and what we learned from it.

The terrorists who attacked America were Islamist extremists. That distinction is important. Islam is a religion practiced peacefully by millions of Americans and more than a billion people around the world. But the ideology that motivated al-Qaeda was real, explicitly religious and violently opposed to the freedoms and values of Western society. Pretending otherwise does not promote tolerance. It simply makes history harder to understand.

At the same time, something else has changed in America.

Christianity, which profoundly influenced this nation's culture, institutions and moral vocabulary, is increasingly treated in some corners of public life as something embarrassing, backward or even dangerous. Meanwhile, ideas rooted in other religious and cultural traditions — including Islamic ones — are sometimes approached with a reluctance to criticize that we rarely extend to our own.

Tolerance cannot require intellectual surrender.

Americans should defend the right of a Muslim to worship at a mosque just as fiercely as we defend the right of a Christian to worship in a church or a Jew to worship in a synagogue. That is not an Islamic value, a Christian value or a Jewish value alone. It is an American value: religious liberty.

But religious liberty does not require Americans to pretend every belief is compatible with every American principle. Where any religious doctrine — Christian, Muslim or otherwise — conflicts with freedom of speech, equality before the law, freedom of conscience or the constitutional rights of others, our Constitution must prevail.

Perhaps nowhere is our historical amnesia more disturbing than in the antisemitism we increasingly hear spoken openly.

Words and accusations that should set off historical alarms are once again entering ordinary conversation. Jews are sometimes treated collectively as responsible for the actions of governments, blamed for events they had nothing to do with, or subjected to ancient conspiracy theories dressed up in modern political language.

We should know better.

The generation that lived through the Holocaust is disappearing. The generation that remembers 9/11 firsthand is getting older. And memory has a dangerous habit of becoming less urgent as the people who carry it disappear.

That is why anniversaries like the one we marked last week matter.

I am 53 now. I can still remember that classroom. I can still remember staring at that television and realizing that whatever plans we had for our military careers had just been rewritten. In the years that followed, thousands of American service members would deploy overseas. Some would come home wounded. Some would carry wounds nobody could see.

Some would never come home at all.

And military families would spend years living with deployments, missed birthdays, empty chairs and the knowledge that a knock at the door could change everything.

But I remember something else about the days after September 11.

American flags appeared everywhere.

Strangers spoke to one another. Political differences that seemed enormous on September 10 suddenly seemed very small. Churches filled. People prayed. Americans lined up to donate blood. First responders ran toward danger while everyone else was running away.

For a little while, we remembered that there was more holding us together than pulling us apart.

We were not perfect then. We did not suddenly agree on everything, and fear sometimes produced ugly treatment of innocent Muslim and Sikh Americans who had nothing to do with the attacks. That, too, belongs in an honest telling of the history.

But there was a lesson in the unity that followed.

A nation can argue fiercely and still understand that it is one nation.

Today, we seem determined to reverse that equation. Politics has become tribal. Disagreement becomes hatred. Words like “Nazi” and “fascist” are tossed around so casually that they risk losing the terrible historical meaning they carry. Antisemitism is finding new audiences. Religion is too often judged according to who practices it rather than whether the principle being defended is consistent with liberty.

And an entire generation has now reached adulthood without remembering the morning we learned just how fragile the ordinary can be.

That may be the greatest challenge as we move beyond this 25th anniversary.

“Never Forget” cannot simply mean posting a photograph of the Twin Towers once a year.

It means teaching our children what happened.

It means remembering the 2,977 innocent people murdered that day.

It means remembering the firefighters, police officers, paramedics and ordinary citizens who demonstrated what courage looks like.

It means remembering those who answered their country's call afterward.

It means rejecting antisemitism and religious hatred while refusing to become so afraid of offending someone that we cannot speak truthfully about history or extremist ideologies.

And it means understanding that freedom is neither automatic nor permanent. Every generation inherits it, and every generation must decide whether it is willing to defend it.

Twenty-five years ago, America was wounded.

But we stood up.

Perhaps the best way to honor those we lost is not merely to remember how they died, but to remember who we became in the days afterward — Americans who understood that whatever our differences, this country and the freedoms it represents were worth standing together for.

A generation has grown up since then.

Now it is our responsibility to make sure the lessons grow up with them.

Because America doesn't quit, and it doesn't bow. And 25 years later, the beat goes on — but only if we remember what keeps it beating.

— CH