Never Forget Now Means Teaching

Roughly a quarter of Americans alive today were not yet born on September 11, 2001. Millions more were too young to remember or truly understand it. For the first time, 9/11 is passing out of memory and into history.

That changes what “Never Forget” asks of us. For twenty-five years it’s been a promise we made to the dead. It now has to become something we teach the living.

Here’s what I’d want taught.

We are not invincible. Evil exists in this world. Threats that gather overseas can cross our borders and do us harm. We learned that lesson at a cost of nearly three thousand lives.

Heroes do exist. Firefighters, police, and first responders ran toward danger that morning. Hundreds of them perished that day trying to save others and thousands more have since passed away from 9/11-related illness. It’s one of the clearest pictures this country has ever produced of what it looks like to put someone else’s life ahead of your own.

We knew how to come together. The attack was on all of us. The men who did this didn't care about our politics, our race, our faith, or our net worth — every American was a target that morning, and we responded accordingly. There was a time when bipartisanship wasn't rare, it was closer to the norm. That unity is available to us again, and it shouldn't take another catastrophe to get it.

It defined a generation of public servants. I was 20 years old on 9/11. It shaped my core belief in public service and in what’s possible when we unite. I went on to serve alongside some of the finest military and intelligence officers this nation has ever assembled. We were driven by duty, by a cause greater than ourselves, and by care for one another. Thousands died or were wounded in the great war of our time. And far too many exceptional public servants have since been pushed out of government, and our nation is less safe for it.

We can do hard things. I’ve seen government at its finest. Focus. Urgency. Relentless determination that it would not happen again. Twenty-five years without a catastrophic attack on American soil isn’t luck. It’s the result of a generation that took the fight to the enemy and took al-Qa’ida apart.

That doesn't mean we got it all right — we didn't, and that belongs in the teaching too. But whatever else is true about those years, we were capable of enormous, sustained, urgent effort. We were capable of it because the American people expected it of us.

That expectation is the lesson underneath all the others.

The focus, the urgency, the refusal to accept that something was too hard — all of it started with a country that demanded it and wouldn’t take less. We rose to the standard we were held to.

We’re more divided now, and we expect less. Of each other, and of the people who serve us.

So the final thing I’d want taught is the thing that made all the rest possible: what this country is capable of has always depended on what its people expect of it. Raise your standards. Expect more.

Today, remembrance isn’t enough. If you were there, tell someone who wasn’t. That’s the work now.