Twenty-Five Years After 9/11, What Happened to the “We”?

I remember the fear. I remember the togetherness. And I remember how quickly fear began deciding who counted as American.

By Michael Smith — Reflective MVS

I was 20 years old on September 11, 2001.

I was living in a studio apartment in Tallahassee, Florida. Nothing historic about the setting. No sweeping view of Manhattan. No newsroom. No government building. Just a young man in a small apartment watching television, knowing that later that afternoon I still had to go to work.

And then the world changed through a television screen.

Twenty-five years later, I won't pretend every minute remains perfectly ordered in my memory. Memory has its own editing room. Scenes move around. Details blur. Some moments become sharper than things that happened yesterday.

But I remember the images.

I remember watching footage of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center.

I remember continuing to watch.

And I remember seeing the second plane hit.

That was the moment when whatever explanation you were trying to give yourself disappeared.

One plane could be an accident.

Two planes?

Something was happening.

Then came the Pentagon.

Then the news about another plane going down in Pennsylvania.

New York. Washington. Pennsylvania.

All within minutes.

I remember thinking what millions of Americans must have been thinking that morning:

Are we under attack?

We were.

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower. Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower. At 9:37, American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. At 10:03, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

By the time that morning was over, nearly 3,000 people had been killed.

But those numbers came later.

In the moment, we didn't know how big this was going to get.

That uncertainty is something I think gets lost when we look back at September 11 now.

Today we know the timeline. We know there were four planes. We know what happened at the Pentagon. We know where Flight 93 went down. We know the towers collapsed.

Sitting in that apartment that morning, we didn't have the history book yet.

We were living the page while somebody was still writing it.

And we didn't know whether the next sentence would have Atlanta in it. Chicago. Los Angeles. Tallahassee.

Somewhere else.

Anybody else.

I eventually went to work.

There is something strange about that sentence now.

The country had just been attacked, the Twin Towers had collapsed on television, and I still had a shift.

Welcome to adulthood.

I worked behind the butcher block at an Albertsons supermarket. That afternoon, the normal little conversations between employees and customers weren't normal anymore.

People were scared.

People were stunned.

Customers came to the counter talking about what they had seen. Coworkers were trying to make sense of it. Everybody seemed to be carrying the same unanswered question:

Is it over?

Nobody knew.

I remember the disbelief. I remember watching people jump from the towers because the alternative behind them was fire.

There are images the brain seems to file somewhere in the back because bringing them forward too often would be unbearable.

Those are some of them.

And underneath all of it was a question bigger than terrorism:

Is this really happening here?

Here.

America.

The country we had been taught was untouchable.

For the next several days, my friends and I gathered together and watched the coverage.

And watched.

And watched.

There wasn't a social-media feed refreshing every twelve seconds. There was television, and practically every channel had become the same channel.

America was staring at the same pictures together.

Maybe that is part of what I remember most about the days after September 11.

Not only the horror.

The togetherness.

People checked on one another.

Strangers talked to strangers.

Flags appeared everywhere.

Political differences that had seemed enormous on September 10 suddenly looked very small.

For a brief moment, there was a feeling that whatever else we were, we were in this together.

I remember something else from those days that surprises me when I think about it now.

I remember feeling supportive of President George W. Bush.

Bush wasn't the candidate I had voted for. The 2000 election had been the first presidential election in which I was old enough to vote.

But after September 11, there were moments when partisan politics seemed beside the point.

One of those moments came six days after the attacks.

Bush went to the Islamic Center of Washington.

Standing inside a mosque, with Muslim leaders beside him, the president told a frightened country something it badly needed to hear: “Islam is peace.”

He said the terrorists did not represent Islam. He reminded Americans that Muslims were our doctors, lawyers, soldiers, shopkeepers, mothers and fathers. He warned Americans against turning their anger toward innocent Muslim neighbors.

I didn't agree with George W. Bush on plenty.

History would give us even more to disagree about.

But I remember respecting him for that.

Because leadership sometimes means telling frightened people what they don't want fear to let them believe.

The nineteen hijackers were Muslim.

That did not make Islam responsible for September 11.

If those nineteen men had been Christians, would Christianity itself have been put on trial?

Would every Catholic have been expected to explain himself? Every Baptist? Every Methodist? Every Protestant church in America?

Of course not.

We instinctively understand that a murderer who happens to share our faith does not become the spokesman for our faith.

Muslim Americans deserved the same grace.

Too often, they didn't get it.

I remember the anti-Muslim hatred beginning almost immediately. The suspicion. The slurs. The casual association of an entire religion with nineteen terrorists.

Muslim Americans had watched the same buildings fall.

They lost relatives, friends, coworkers and neighbors.

Muslim police officers, doctors, military personnel and ordinary citizens were part of the same wounded country.

Yet some were suddenly required to prove that they belonged to it.

So when we remember the great American unity after September 11, we should tell the whole truth.

The unity was real.

So was the exclusion.

America wrapped its arms around itself while sometimes deciding that certain Americans had to stand outside the embrace.

And that contradiction makes today especially difficult to ignore.

Twenty-five years after the attacks, New York City has its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

He is attending today's ceremony at Ground Zero in his official role as mayor, alongside families, survivors, first responders and national leaders. His administration has also designated September 11 an annual citywide Day of Remembrance and Service.

And somehow, his presence has itself become controversial.

To be fair, not every objection is about his religion.

Some 9/11 families and political opponents have raised objections based on Mamdani's political associations, previous statements and appointments. Those disagreements should be described honestly rather than reduced to one motive.

But religion is undeniably part of the backlash.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has explicitly invoked Mamdani's Muslim faith while arguing that he should stay away. Others have drawn insinuations between a Muslim mayor and the extremists who attacked this country 25 years ago. Reuters reports that, despite calls for his exclusion, Mamdani will participate in today's commemoration.

That is a remarkable circle.

Six days after September 11, 2001, a Republican president walked into a mosque and told Americans not to confuse terrorism with Islam.

Twenty-five years later, America's largest city has elected a Muslim mayor, and some Americans are arguing that his religion makes his presence inappropriate at a memorial to an attack on his city.

Maybe that tells us something about how much we learned.

And how much we didn't.

I don't write that because I want to romanticize the America of September 12, 2001.

We shouldn't.

The country that came together also embraced policies and wars whose consequences we are still sorting through. Civil liberties narrowed. Surveillance expanded. Muslims, Arabs and South Asians were profiled and targeted. Fear became political currency.

Unity can be beautiful.

Unity without reflection can also be dangerous.

But there was still something in those first days worth recovering.

The instinct to reach toward one another.

The understanding that another person's suffering mattered even when you didn't know their name.

The realization that citizenship was supposed to mean something larger than party, race, religion or geography.

There was, however imperfectly, a we.

And 25 years later, that word sometimes feels harder to say.

We live in a country where political opponents increasingly describe one another not merely as wrong, but as enemies.

Where Americans can inhabit entirely different realities depending on which television channel they watch or which algorithm feeds their phone.

Where immigration status, race, religion, sexuality, geography and political affiliation become convenient tools for determining who is sufficiently “American.”

The threats we fear have changed too.

Reuters reported this week that a majority of Americans now view ideologically motivated violence from domestic extremists as a greater threat than attacks originating abroad. On the 25th anniversary of the deadliest foreign terrorist attack on American soil, many Americans are more worried about what Americans might do to one another.

Think about that for a moment.

Twenty-five years ago, I sat in a little studio apartment wondering who was attacking us.

Today, too often, we seem busy attacking the idea of us itself.

And yet I don't want this anniversary to become another sermon about how terrible everything is now.

That is too easy.

I keep returning instead to that supermarket counter in Tallahassee.

Twenty years old.

Customers coming up.

Coworkers talking.

Everybody scared.

Nobody knowing what came next.

For a little while, the labels weren't as important.

Nobody at that butcher counter asked whether the person beside them was a Republican or Democrat before talking about what had happened.

Nobody needed an algorithm to tell them whether somebody else's fear deserved empathy.

We had been reminded, brutally, that our lives were connected.

The mistake was believing tragedy made that true.

It didn't.

Our lives were connected on September 10.

They were connected on September 12.

They're connected now.

I don't want another September 11 to remind us.

I don't want another building to fall.

Another plane to crash.

Another mass grave.

Another national nightmare before we rediscover empathy and start calling strangers our neighbors again.

Twenty-five years ago, I watched those towers fall and wondered what was happening to my country.

Today, the question feels different.

If tragedy was powerful enough to make us see one another as Americans then, why can't we choose to see one another that way now, before something else has to fall?

— Michael Smith
Reflective MVS | Insights Uncovered