September 11: Remembering a Day I Never Saw

Twenty-five years later, my generation has a responsibility to remember a day we know only through others’ stories.

September 11, 2001, happened four years before I was born. I don’t remember where I was when the first plane hit the North Tower because I wasn’t here. I never watched the second plane hit live on television. I never saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon or heard the confused reports coming out of Pennsylvania.

Everything I know about September 11 came from someone else.  My parents’ generation remembers exactly where they were. Mine remembers watching the videos in school.

Every September, teachers would turn down the lights and show us footage from that morning. We saw the airplanes. We saw the towers burning. We saw people running through Manhattan’s streets.

But another image always stayed with me.

While thousands of people were trying desperately to escape the World Trade Center, firefighters, police officers, and other first responders were running toward it.

Think about that for a moment.

They knew they were walking into danger. They knew people were trapped. They went anyway.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 attacks at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and aboard Flight 93.

Those numbers tell us the scale of what happened, but numbers don’t really explain September 11.

People do.  One of those people was Todd Beamer.

Beamer was a passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 93. After passengers learned through phone calls that other hijacked aircraft had already struck the World Trade Center, they realized their airplane was likely part of the same attack.

They had an impossible choice.

Sit there and hope for the best or fight back.

They fought.

Beamer became forever associated with two simple words: “Let’s roll.” Passengers and crew members attempted to retake the cockpit, and Flight 93 ultimately crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, before reaching Washington. Investigators concluded that the hijackers’ intended target may have been the U.S. Capitol.

I think about that story because those passengers didn’t know how history would remember them.

There was no guarantee they would succeed. No audience was waiting to applaud them.

They knew something terrible was happening and decided to do something about it.

That is courage.

Twenty-five years have passed since September 11.

For people my age, there is a danger that 9/11 becomes another chapter in a history book. A date to memorize. A documentary watched once a year. Something that happened “a long time ago.”

We cannot allow that to happen.

We should remember the firefighters climbing the stairs while others came down. Remember the police officers, paramedics, and ordinary Americans who helped strangers. Remember the people at the Pentagon. Remember the passengers and crew of Flight 93.

And above all, remember the people who left home that Tuesday morning expecting an ordinary day and never came home.

My generation cannot remember September 11 from experience.

But we can choose to remember what it meant.

We can tell the stories. We can say the names. We can teach the next generation.

Twenty-five years later, “Never Forget” shouldn’t just be something printed beneath a picture of the Twin Towers.

It should be a promise.  And now that promise belongs to us.

David Lee writes on politics, budgets, and public accountability for Direct Line News.

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