On this day, twenty-four years ago, the sun rose over an ordinary Tuesday. The skies were clear, commuters filled subways, children filed into classrooms, and the rhythm of American life moved with its usual hum. Then, in the span of mere minutes, everything changed. Towers fell, fire raged, lives were lost, and our nation was pierced with a wound that would never fully close.
And yet, out of the ashes, something profound emerged: unity.
In those days after September 11th, we were not Democrats or Republicans, coastal elites or small-town citizens, skeptics or believers. We were Americans. Strangers carried one another down stairwells thick with smoke. Firefighters, knowing full well the cost, ran into flames so others could live. Neighbors wept together, prayed together, and stood watch over the flag as if it were the heartbeat of our collective soul.
No one asked for credentials before offering a hand. No one demanded to know your politics before embracing you. For a brief, sacred time, the walls we had built around ourselves crumbled, and we remembered who we truly were: one people, bound not by ideology but by shared humanity, under God.
I fear that memory is fading.
Today, twenty-four years later, we trade insults where we once traded prayers. We choose suspicion over compassion, partisanship over patriotism. We argue about everything, lines on a map, colors of a banner, words in a post, while forgetting that once we stood shoulder to shoulder, not because we were the same, but because we belonged to one another.
The lesson of 9/11 was not only about loss, but about love. A love that lays down its life for strangers. A love that puts the whole above the part. A love that reminds us that our nation’s strength is not measured in the size of its armies or the height of its skyscrapers, but in the depth of its unity.
If we found that strength twenty-four years ago, in the face of unspeakable horror, why not today?
To honor those we lost is to do more than pause in silence or raise flags to half-mast. It is to live as they would have wanted us to live—courageously, generously, and together. It is to reject the easy seduction of hatred and the constant temptation of division. It is to remember that freedom is fragile, but hope endures when we choose love over fear, truth over propaganda, unity over discord.
The towers may be gone, but their shadow still falls across us. May it remind us not only of what was taken, but of what was revealed: a people who, even in ashes, found each other.
Let us remember not only the tragedy, but the triumph of unity. Let us, once again, be the America that bows together in prayer, that stands together in resolve, that believes still that we are one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.