John, twenty-five years ago this morning, I was in my dental office when the first reports came across the radio.

A plane had struck the North Tower. Then the second. Then the Pentagon. Then a field in Pennsylvania.

The sky that morning had been clear and ordinary. By nightfall, nearly 3,000 of our fellow Americans were gone. Mothers and fathers who kissed their children goodbye. Firefighters who ran up the stairs while everyone else ran down. Office workers who held the door for a stranger. Passengers on Flight 93 who decided that if they were going to die, they would die fighting.

I still think about the tables that were set that night and never cleared. The children who grew up with a photograph instead of a parent. The first responders who walked out of the smoke and carried that day in their lungs for the rest of their lives.

A generation has now come of age that never saw those towers standing. They have only known the world after. That is why we tell the story again. Not to reopen the wound, but to keep the memory from shrinking into something smaller than it was.
 

We remember so that courage is not reduced to a date on a calendar.

We remember so that sacrifice is not treated as history.

We remember because forgetting would be the final insult to the people who never came home.

Out here, the flags went up on ranch gates and porch posts before the sun had even set. Small towns went quiet. People who had never met stood in parking lots and church lots and said almost nothing, because there was nothing small enough to say.

That silence still belongs to them.

God bless the souls we lost. God bless the families who still carry them. God bless the United States of America.

We will NEVER forget,

Paul Gosar

U.S. Congressman AZ-09