I’m almost certain I’ve heard more 9/11 stories than anyone else on earth.
For almost 12 years, I served as the founding CEO of the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, a role that invited countless strangers to share their stories from that terrible day. On planes, at gas stations, in meetings or on street corners, the mere mention of my work unlocked solemn reminiscing, and I always felt honored to listen.
Over time, I have noticed a pattern. The stories typically begin on 9/11, but rarely end there. They drift into the weeks and months that followed: people who tossed duffel bags into their cars and drove hundreds of miles to volunteer at Ground Zero; sons and daughters compelled to enlist to fight in the names of the innocent victims; strangers who welcomed stranded travelers into their homes.
Americans channeled grief and fear into acts of service and unity of purpose. I’ve always found it telling that even years after the attacks, these are the memories people chose to share with me.
Tempting though it is to recall pre-9/11 America through sunny filters, America seethed with partisan animus even then. Nine months before the attacks, the Supreme Court had decided Bush v. Gore; three years earlier, the Clinton impeachment had rocked the country.
But in the wake of 9/11, the chasms we once shouted across became neighborhoods again.
It’s not that Americans suddenly agreed on all that divided them. And to be sure, we must continue to address the hate that some wrongly embraced in the aftermath of that tragic day. But 9/11 largely clarified an essential truth: beneath our disagreements lay common cause. The 2,977 people murdered that day hailed from 92 nations. They were rich and poor, religious and secular, native-born, and immigrant. They practiced different faiths, subscribed to different political views, and lived very different lives from even those seated right next to them on that fateful day. But in those differences, they represented the American experiment itself, and in putting aside our conflicts, Americans tacitly acknowledged that it was worth protecting.
Twenty-five years later, I am alarmed not by the solidarity we’ve lost, but by the erosion of consensus about the terms under which we disagree. Democracy itself has become debatable, especially among young people. Only 66% of Americans now say democratically elected government is “extremely” or “very important” to the nation’s identity, down from 80% in 2021. Another recent survey found roughly one in five Americans endorse harassment, doxxing, or even violence against their political adversaries. And perhaps most stunning of all is that only 14%of those between the ages of 18 and 34 are extremely proud to be an American.
Those figures belie a disturbing trend in our political discourse: moral absolutism. A healthy democracy makes space even for fierce dissent. The danger comes when political clashes become crusades, and the self-declared righteousness of the cause becomes license to abandon democratic restraints.
Almost nothing went uncontested while we built the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. We fought over how to arrange the names of the dead, how and whether to represent the hijackers, and what would we delve into about America’s response. These weren’t academic debates. They were real conflicts waged by people of all backgrounds, laden with grief and anger, bound by deeply held personal, emotional, and political convictions and competing ideas about what America owed the dead and the living.
Yet we still had to build on sacred ground.
The experience taught me that pluralism doesn’t require agreement. It requires something harder: accepting that sometimes you will lose the argument, but you stay at the table anyway.
Our job wasn’t to make disagreements disappear. There was no universe where that was possible. Instead, my job was to help determine which differences the institution had an obligation to accommodate and where it had an obligation to draw a line. We could tell the truth about American failures without concluding that America itself was a failure. We could explain why the terrorists hated this country without adopting their indictment of it.
A democracy depends on the same distinctions.
The rule of law, free expression, and equal citizenship are not partisan preferences to be renegotiated after every election. They are the terms of the deal. Protecting someone’s right to reject the American experiment is different from treating that rejection as simply another interpretation of it. A pluralistic society can tolerate almost limitless disagreement precisely because there are some principles it cannot and should not surrender.
Now, this 25th anniversary demands more from us.
The America attacked that morning was never defined by consensus. It was defined by a shared conviction that our freedoms belong as fully to people we bitterly oppose as to people we love; that our democracy is worth defending not because it settles our differences, but because it gives us a way to live with them; and that while each of us may nurture our own vision for a more perfect union, it remains a union nonetheless.
The post 25 Years After 9/11, Americans Must Remember What Binds Us appeared first on TIME.
