I have lived through more than a few moments that seemed to stop the world. I remember the Challenger explosion. Desert Storm. Chernobyl. The fall of the Berlin Wall. COVID. I watched the arrival of the iPhone change how we communicate, consume information and experience everyday life. I have watched trust in our institutions, our elected leaders and even the news itself steadily erode.

Each changed something.

But now, 25 years after 9/11, I can still say that nothing changed the world—or affected me—quite like September 11, 2001.

There was America before 9/11, and there was America after it.

The world had changed

I remember flying approximately two months after the attacks. As we boarded, someone pulled apart the chicken sandwich I had purchased to inspect it and then handed it back to me—as though I might still want to eat it.

It sounds almost funny now. It didn’t feel funny then.

We were all trying to understand the new rules of a world that suddenly felt far less safe.

On another flight into Washington, D.C., the ramp leading from the plane into the terminal was lined with armed soldiers. Their presence made the threat feel immediate again. This wasn’t something confined to a television screen or a newspaper headline. The country had changed, and we were living inside that change.

Years later, I visited New York before the 9/11 Memorial as we know it today was completed.

At the site, a chain-link fence had become a place of remembrance. People from across the country had left hand-painted tiles bearing names, flags, prayers and promises.

God bless America.

We will not forget.

We will never forget.

Some were beautifully painted. Others carried the unmistakable handwriting and artwork of children. Many listed the names of people who never came home.They weren’t professionally designed memorials. They were more personal than that. They were small pieces of grief, love, gratitude and patriotism left behind by people who needed some way to say, “You mattered. We remember.”

I also visited St. Paul’s Chapel, where firefighters, rescue workers and volunteers found rest, food, care and refuge during the long months of recovery. I sat in one of its pews and thought about the exhausted men and women who had occupied that same space before returning to the unimaginable work waiting outside.

There are places where history refuses to remain history.

That fence and that church were two of them.

What we remembered about ourselves

Twenty-five years later, I remember the horror of that day. But I also remember what happened afterward.I remember flags appearing everywhere. I remember the gratitude we expressed for first responders, members of our military and the ordinary people who demonstrated extraordinary courage. I remember neighbors checking on neighbors. I remember a country that, for one brief moment, stopped sorting people according to political party, race, region or ideology.

We were Americans.

The unity that followed 9/11 did not erase our differences or solve our problems. It did something equally important: it reminded us that beneath those differences was something we shared—and something worth protecting.

That is the part I fear we may be forgetting.

Patriotism was never abstract in my family

Perhaps my feelings about this run especially deep because patriotism was never an abstract idea in my family.

My grandfather fought in World War II. My father was part of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My brother served. Friends and people I love were part of Desert Storm and numerous other deployments. I grew up understanding that the freedoms we enjoy did not simply appear and they are not guaranteed to remain. People sacrificed for them. Families waited and worried for them. Some gave their lives for them.

That does not mean America has always gotten everything right. Loving your country does not require ignoring its failures. In fact, love should demand that we confront those failures honestly and work to make the country live more fully according to its principles. But there is a difference between wanting America to do better and believing there is nothing about America worth defending.

That difference matters.

We recently celebrated America’s 250th anniversary, yet even that became another opportunity for political parties to fight, divide and assign blame. A milestone that could have invited us to reflect on everything this improbable experiment in self-government has survived became one more argument about who was allowed to tell its story.

It has become exhausting to watch.

When reporting becomes persuasion

As a former journalist, I find the condition of our public conversation especially disheartening. Too much of what passes for news begins with a conclusion and selects the facts that support it. Stories are framed for an audience rather than reported for citizens. Commentary and reporting blur together until people can hardly tell where one ends and the other begins.

Impartiality feels increasingly rare.

But we, the audience, have responsibilities as well.

Today, anyone can find a headline, influencer, celebrity, politician or social media post that confirms what they already believe. Agreement is always one search away. Truth usually requires more effort.

It requires us to look deeper. Read beyond the headline. Seek more than one perspective. Examine the source. Ask what has been omitted. Apply healthy skepticism—even when the message comes from someone on “our side.”

It requires us to do our own thinking instead of outsourcing it to the loudest person on a screen.

Perhaps that is another lesson we are in danger of forgetting: freedom requires citizens capable of discernment.

A free country cannot remain strong if its people surrender their judgment to political parties, media personalities, celebrities, influencers or algorithms. We do not have to agree on every policy. We do have to care enough about the country—and one another—to seek the truth before joining the outrage.

Patriotism should not belong to a political party

I am troubled when antisemitism is excused, when terrorism is romanticized or when hatred is repackaged as righteous resistance.

I am troubled when people speak as though loving America is something requiring an apology.

I am troubled when ideas with profound consequences are reduced to attractive slogans and repeated without serious questions about what they would mean in practice.

And I am troubled by how quickly reasonable concern is dismissed simply because someone has decided it belongs to the “wrong” political side.

Concern about these things should not belong to one political party. Neither should patriotism.

We can debate immigration, foreign policy, economics and the proper role of government. We should debate them. But those debates should begin with a shared commitment to protecting the nation, preserving freedom, rejecting hatred and pursuing truth.

The people who served this country did not all belong to the same party.

The people who died on September 11 did not all vote the same way.

The firefighters who climbed those stairs did not stop to ask which victims shared their politics.

For a brief time, we remembered that there was something larger than our differences.

Have we forgotten?

What does “never forget” require of us now?

Today, disagreement too easily becomes contempt. Patriotism is sometimes treated as naïve, embarrassing or even suspect. The most cynical voices often receive the largest platforms, leaving those who quietly love this country wondering whether they are now in the minority.

I hope we are not.

I hope the heart of America is still filled with people who understand that loving our country does not require pretending it has never failed.

Love is not blindness. We can acknowledge our shortcomings, demand better and work to correct injustice while still recognizing the freedom, opportunity and promise worth defending.

We can disagree about policies and politics without being ashamed of the nation we are asking to improve. This should not be a Republican belief or a Democratic belief. It should be an American one.

A nation has both the right and the responsibility to protect its people, its freedoms and the principles that hold it together. Its citizens have a responsibility, too—not merely to enjoy those freedoms, but to value them, defend them and pass them forward.

Perhaps the best way to honor the 25th anniversary of 9/11 is to remember more than what happened to us that day.

We should remember the courage of those who ran toward danger.

We should remember the lives taken and the families forever changed.

We should remember the strangers who became neighbors and the neighbors who became family.

We should remember the flags, the prayers, the painted tiles and the promises.

And we should remember what we recognized about ourselves: that for all our flaws and differences, we belonged to one another.

Twenty-five years ago, we promised we would never forget. The tiles I saw hanging from that fence carried that promise in paint, names, fingerprints and children’s handwriting.

But perhaps never forgetting requires more than remembering where we were that morning. Perhaps it also means remembering who we became in the days that followed—grateful, generous, courageous, united and unashamed to love our country.

That is the America I still believe in. May the voices of gratitude, service, courage and love of country become louder than the cynicism that seeks to divide us.

And may we never again need a tragedy to remind us that America is still worth protecting—and that we are Americans first.