For a few days in September of 2001, this country was the version of itself we all say we want it to be.
You remember it if you’re old enough. Strangers stood in line for hours to give blood. Firefighters from towns that had never lost a soul suddenly lost dozens of their own and showed up for the next shift anyway. People flew flags off porches that had never flown one. Neighbors who had lived beside each other for years without speaking suddenly knocked on the door to ask if everyone was okay. Nobody checked party registration first. Nobody asked where you were from or who you’d voted for. For a little while, we were simply Americans, and we treated each other like it.
That is the part of September 11th worth holding onto. Not just the horror of the morning, though we should never let go of that either, but what came after. The way ordinary people decided exactly what kind of people they were going to be. The firefighters who climbed staircases they knew they might not walk back down. The passengers on a fourth plane who understood what was coming and fought anyway. The volunteers who drove through the night to hand out water. None of what made that day matter came from Washington. It came from regular people giving the best of themselves to strangers, and asking for nothing back.
Twenty-five years is a long time. Long enough that millions of Americans alive today have no memory of that morning at all. Long enough that those of us who lived it have to work harder than we used to at remembering what it actually felt like, instead of the flattened, once-a-year, ceremonial version.
And long enough that we have to be honest with ourselves about a hard truth: we have drifted a very long way from the country we were that week.
We are more divided now than most of us could have imagined standing in those blood-donation lines in 2001. We look at our neighbors and, too often, we see an enemy before we see a person. The instinct that came so naturally that September, to give one another the benefit of the doubt, to lead with grace, to assume the best, has withered. We’ve let it atrophy. And nothing has made that clearer than watching how some of the most powerful people in the country treat the memory of that day itself.
Ahead of this anniversary, the President told a story about September 11th that he had never told before. He claimed two firefighters, big strong guys, grabbed him near Ground Zero and carried him to safety from a collapsing building. CNN, NBC, and PBS all went looking. There is no record of it. No firefighter who remembers it. No documentation at all, in a place that ran on documentation precisely so nothing would be lost. A former official who helped coordinate the response said that if it had happened, there would be a record, and there isn’t one.
I’m not going to spend this column relitigating one man’s claim, because the specific lie is almost beside the point. What troubles me is what it represents. The firefighters who actually carried people out of real danger that day don’t need anyone stealing their valor after the fact.
September 11th at its best was about giving something of yourself and asking for nothing in return. Inventing your way into someone else’s heroism is the exact reverse. It takes the credit without paying any of the cost. And that inversion, taking instead of giving, is as good a description as any of how far we’ve fallen from the spirit of that week.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, though, and it’s the reason I wanted to write this at all: the distance we’ve traveled from 2001 is not a reason for despair. It’s the assignment.
More than forty years ago, John F. Kennedy stood on the Capitol steps and told a divided, anxious country to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. That call didn’t expire. It’s the same call this country answered on September 12th, 2001, when millions of people quietly decided to be of use to someone else.
And it is the exact same call being made to us right now, in 2026, on an ordinary Friday when nothing has gone wrong yet. The circumstances change. The ask never does. Give your neighbor grace before you give them suspicion. Tell the truth about hard things. Put the country ahead of yourself, and ahead of your side.
For me, that looked like joining the Air Force after the attacks on 9/11. I was so dead-set on defending my country, that I would have gone into the Army if the Air Force hadn’t taken me. I had wanted to serve already, but the day’s events sealed the deal. For you, country over self doesn’t have to be military service; it can be the small ways you choose to do something that is bigger than what’s on our daily to do lists.
We already know we can do this, because we’ve done it. We proved it in the worst week of our lives, generation to generation, when it counted most. The only question the 25th anniversary really puts to us is whether we can be the neighbors we were that September without needing another tragedy to remind us how.
And if we’re being honest, the size of our divisions today doesn’t let us off the hook. It does the opposite. The 2,977 people who died that morning, the 441 first responders who ran toward the danger, the passengers who fought back, all of them gave everything they had. The bigger the gap between who we are now and who we were then, the larger the debt we owe them to close it. Not with a speech once a year. With how we treat each other the other 364 days.
Twenty-five years later, September 11th is still asking us to give our best to one another and to this country. The people we lost already answered. The least we can do, in their honor, is find our way back to the country they died believing in.
Once again, Adam, you have met the moment with your column.
Excellent article, Adam, and yes...we ALL need to find our way back to that time in space. We have been led astray and manipulated by 'the great deceiver'.