The sky was impossibly blue that morning.
That’s one of the strange details I remember about Sept. 11, 2001. Before the smoke, before the sirens, before the realization that the first plane had not been an accident, it was simply a beautiful late-summer Tuesday — even in Tennessee, nearly 650 miles from Lower Manhattan.
Then, in the space of 102 minutes, the world we knew disappeared.
Every generation has a moment, for better or worse, that defines it. The stock market collapse of ’29, Pearl Harbor, JFK’s assassination, the Challenger explosion, Covid-19.
Ours was 9/11.
For Millennials and even Generation X’ers, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, divided our lives into “before” and “after.” The nation’s defining moments always serve to shatter illusions about how the world works, and 9/11 certainly shattered ours.
Twenty-five years have passed since 2,977 innocent people were murdered at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and aboard United Flight 93. That’s long enough for a newborn to become an adult, for an adult to grow old, and for memories that once seemed permanently seared into the national consciousness to begin fading around the edges.
There are now millions of adults who were not alive on 9/11. To them, the attacks belong to history in much the same way Pearl Harbor belonged to those who came before them. They have seen the photographs, watched the footage, know the date. But knowing is not the same as remembering.
Those of us who remember can still feel the confusion of that morning. The televisions being rolled into classrooms and radios turned up in offices. The second plane striking the South Tower and the instant understanding that America was under attack. We remember watching people leap from burning buildings because the alternative was worse. We remember the towers falling and the great clouds of dust swallowing entire city blocks.
We remember waiting to learn what would happen next.
In Cookeville, Tennessee, one of my earliest thoughts was that I needed an American flag. I wanted something, anything, that was red, white, and blue to fly from our apartment door. Weird, maybe, but definitely not an original thought, because when I got to Walmart, the shelves where the flags were ordinarily stocked were bare.
On the way home from Walmart, we drove through the courthouse square. Dozens of people had turned out for an impromptu candlelight vigil. It had not been planned. No one in a position of authority had announced it. It had just happened.
Three days later, Oneida was playing a football game at Sunbright. As I drove to the game, a desk flag taped to my car’s radio antenna, truckers would honk as I passed them on the interstate.
For a brief moment after the attacks, America seemed to rediscover itself. Political labels stopped mattering. Strangers spoke to one another. Churches filled up. People stood in line to donate blood for victims. And those flags appeared on front porches, overpasses, and pickup trucks.
That unity was real. For a little while, Americans remembered that citizenship was more than an argument. We understood that whatever our disagreements, we shared a country and a common fate. Firefighters had not asked the political affiliation of the people trapped above them as they climbed the stairs of the burning towers. Passengers aboard Flight 93 had not divided themselves by ideology before rushing the cockpit. Police officers, paramedics, and the ordinary people who turned into Good Samaritans at Ground Zero did not pause to determine who deserved saving.
Everyone simply acted.
That is, perhaps, the most painful contrast between then and now.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, we have become a nation that can turn the most innocuous things into partisan weapons. We sort ourselves into rival camps and treat neighbors as enemies. We allow algorithms, politicians and television personalities to keep us angry because our anger is profitable. We speak casually of secession and civil war, as if a country is something disposable instead of an inheritance purchased at an almost unimaginable cost.
We promised after September 11 that we would never forget. We still remind ourselves of that pledge at this time each year: “Never forget.” We have largely kept that promise when it comes to the images and the names. Memorials stand where the towers once stood. Ceremonies are held. Bells toll. The stories of the dead are read aloud.
But remembering 9/11 has to mean more than replaying the footage once a year.
It has to mean remembering the courage of people who ran toward danger while everyone else ran away. It has to mean remembering the office workers who helped strangers down darkened stairwells. It has to mean remembering the passengers who called home, said goodbye, and then fought back. It has to mean remembering the firefighters who climbed upward carrying nearly 100 pounds of equipment while frightened people streamed passed them in the opposite direction.
It has to mean remembering exactly how the rest of us felt that morning: that, for all our differences, we had confronted a moment when we must be Americans before we were anything else.
The children who sat in classrooms on September 11 are now raising children of their own. The young men and women who answered the attacks by enlisting are entering middle age. The youngest victims would now be older than many of the firefighters who died trying to save them. The first responders who survived continue to die from cancers and respiratory illnesses caused by the toxic dust they breathed at Ground Zero.
Time has moved forward, as it always does.
Yet beneath the passing years, that morning remains: the clear blue sky, the ringing phones, the ash-covered streets, the handwritten missing-person posters, and the almost surreal silence that followed.
On this 25th anniversary, we should remember the dead. We should tell their stories to a generation that never knew them. We should honor the firefighters, police officers, paramedics, service members, and ordinary citizens whose courage revealed the best of this country on its worst day.
But we should also remember who we were on September 12.
We were wounded. We were frightened. We were uncertain. We disagreed about plenty, and we would soon disagree about much more. But for one fleeting moment, we looked across the lines that normally divide us and we saw fellow Americans standing there.
The sky is blue again.
The question is whether we still remember what we saw beneath it.
