So many of John’s thoughts mirror my own. I’ve highlghted those that especially resonate with me.
Horrible days don’t usually start out as horrible days.
As we woke up, made breakfast, walked the dog, got the kids off to school, went to work, or did whatever we did most Thursday mornings here in America, September 11th, 2001, was just another ordinary Tuesday to us… until it wasn’t.
Soon, all hell would break loose, and we would face one of the most catastrophic days in our history.
For those who didn’t live through it, there’s no way to accurately describe the immediate existential free fall: the urgency, the chaos, and the abject terror of those first moments and the hours that followed.
Nothing felt secure.
No place felt safe.
No one was immune to the shaking.
No one was insulated from the grieving.
Everyone was shaken to their core.
So many memories are burned into my brain about those first days: unthinkable images of carnage I’ll never get out of my head, paralyzing waves of fear I’d never experienced, a leaden heaviness that I have rarely felt since.
But I remember more about that time too: I remember America being its best self.
I remember the fierce flood of goodness that arrived almost instantaneously.
I remember people’s staggering courage.
I remember their incomprehensible selflessness.
I remember a unity that transcended politics.
I remember a kindness that bridged religious traditions.
I remember a defiant, expansive love standing stridently in the face of the hatred of a few.
I remember humanity showing itself in breathtaking ways.
A mantra soon rose in those days: “Never forget.”
I suppose that meant different things to different people:
For some it was a declaration to remember the people who died and the lives that were squandered and the legacy they had left.
For some it was a prayer to the heavens, a commitment to live fully from a place of benevolence.
For some it was a condemnation of any hatred born out of bigotry.
For some it was a patriotic pledge of love of country.
For some it was a promise not to lose sight of all they had seen and experienced, about how beautiful people can be.
As I look at this version of America twenty-five years later, it seems as though we’ve all broken our promises, whether to God or country or the fallen or survivors or ourselves.
We’ve forgotten all that we learned on that horrible day in September.
We’ve forgotten how dependent we are on one another, how connected we all are, how tethered to each other’s lives we are, despite the surface differences or the myth of our separation.
We’ve forgotten that in the end, a life in front of us in peril is a life that deserves our attention, a life we’re charged with saving.
We’ve forgotten how difficult and painful a path every person is walking, and how pointless it is to try and make that path more difficult and painful for them.
We’ve forgotten how fragile and fleeting and priceless this life is, and how wasteful it is to spend a moment of it with contempt for strangers.
This is why the grief feels amplified on this September 11th: because of all the promises we’ve broken and all the forgetting we’ve done.
And, worse, today it feels as though for far too many Americans, the words “Never Forget” are now simply thinly veiled expressions of blind hatred of entire people groups, based on a violence they had nothing to do with and gave no approval of. It has simply become a rallying cry for those who seek an excuse to dehumanize their neighbors, for people harboring the same senseless ugliness that authored the nightmare to begin with.
That’s why our forgetting is such a tragedy: we squandered the lessons we could have learned.
September 11th, 2001 was a nightmare for us as a nation, but we woke up that day too.
We saw ourselves clearly.
We saw through the walls and the barriers of created divisions, past the chasms and gaps of surface difference.
We stopped the petty bullshit of partisanism, tribalism, and territorialism, and we realized our oneness.
We caught a glimpse of what America can be when it finds unity in diversity.
That’s what I wish we would have never forgotten in the years since that horrible day in September.
That day we learned to cherish life; to love people fully, to live with open-handed gratitude, to recognize the value of every human being, to move quickly toward someone in pain, to not withhold compassion, to see the best in people, to care for one another as our own.
May we not need another horrible day to remember that again, America.
Never forget who and what we could still be.
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