It’s 9/11 plus 25 years, and my thoughts are all over the place. I recently received an email for a Day of Remembrance blood drive from the American Red Cross. “We invite you to honor the heroes and victims we lost with a simple act of kindness, a blood donation. Our community is strongest when we come together to support one another. The patients who receive your blood may never know your name, but they will always cherish your generosity.”
I’m always in favor of blood drives. Back in 2001, I had a donation scheduled for a couple of days after the awful event. The ARC called me NOT to donate because so many people were already doing something, such as donating blood, ostensibly to give to the survivors. Except that there were relatively few of them in NYC after the buildings collapsed; for instance, about 20 were pulled from the Twin Towers rubble. The Red Cross knew that I was a “regular” and that I would come back.
Forgetting?
2008: I wrote, Even three or four years after September 11, 2001, there was this public conversation that people were “forgetting” 9/11. Or more precisely, had “forgotten the lessons of 9/11.”
If you watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center, you didn’t forget 9/11. Seeing the two towers practically evaporate, you didn’t forget. Nearly three thousand sad stories, and actually, exponentially many more. The anniversary memories I am hearing now are poignant; one I heard recently involved a then two-year-old who doesn’t remember her mother except for a recording, for her mom was a first responder who was killed trying to save others.
My family and I went to the 9/11 Memorial in November 2013. “In honor of the 25th anniversary, 9/11 Memorial & Museum Chairman Mike Bloomberg will match every gift to The Never Forget Fund.”
As horrifically sad as the day was, there was a sense of community, collective grief, and, dare I say, camaraderie. People suddenly didn’t hate the elite New York City folks. Everything You NEED to Know About SNL Season 27 (2001-02) shows how the Saturday Night Live writers and actors pivoted in their approach to comedy.
My wife and I finally got to see Come From Away in 2025, and it is very much in the 9/12 spirit.
Forgotten?
But what were the “forgotten” lessons of 9/11? Newsweek has been running a series, The Road to 9/11, which requires a subscription. Here’s the intro – August 7, 2001: “The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) published a secret report on ‘Iraq‘s Reemerging Nuclear Weapon Program,’ part of a raging debate within U.S. intelligence community agencies as to the state of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program. United Nations inspectors had been banned from inside the country since November 1998, leaving U.S. intelligence to largely speculate as to what was going on.”
September 1, 2001: In Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance detected a build-up of Taliban forces on September 1, evidently in preparation for an upcoming offensive. The intelligence portended something much larger, but at the time, the CIA failed to see the gathering pieces.
Iraq?
2011: I crashed Albany Pro Musica to sing the Mozart Requiem on a very windy 11 September 2002; that was the only day ever that I wore a tuxedo to work. Exactly two weeks later, I began my weekly vigil, with a number of people who had been there weeks and months before, in my opposition to the war in Iraq. What the heck did Iraq have to do with 9/11? Took a bit of grief over that. And it would have been one thing if it were only “regular people” who jumped all over France for failing to support the curiously illogical war in Iraq; it was the US Congress that opted for the jingoistic ‘freedom fries’. How embarrassing.
Indeed, we are still learning from the event. Just this week, from the NYT: After 9/11, Documents Suggest New Yorkers Were Misled About Air Quality. New York City officials are making public more than 170,000 pages of documents related to the air quality around the World Trade Center site in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
What lesson?
So if the “lesson” was that we should adopt the so-called USA PATRIOT ACT, or that a new and unwieldy Department of Homeland Security is necessary, or that Islamophobia is acceptable, then I feel we totally missed the point.
From journalist and former Carter White House speechwriter James Fallows, thoughts on the legacy of 9/11, 25 years after the terrorist attacks: 9/11 changed the U.S.; can we change back?
But if we’ve decided that we can – to quote the cliché – disagree without being disagreeable, and look out for each other, that’s the lesson I can get behind.