A brief departure from my usual writing about taxes, practice management, and technology.
This is not intended as a partisan political statement, although I recognize parts of it may be read that way. It is simply what I remember, and what I find myself thinking about twenty-five years later.
Today marks twenty-five years since September 11, 2001.
It is also my mom’s birthday.
I remember the uncertainty of September 11 more than anything.
The feeling that no one really knew what was happening. Whether there would be more attacks. Whether another city would be hit. Whether the country was safe. Whether the world had just changed permanently.
And, of course, it had.
I remember the small things, too. The strange details that attach themselves to memory while history is unfolding.
I remember opportunists raising gas prices because they saw fear and uncertainty and decided there might be money in it.
And I remember the outrage that followed.
There was still, at least in that moment, a broadly shared expectation that public crisis was not an invitation to fleece people. Public officials condemned it. Ordinary people condemned it. The behavior itself was understood to be shameful.
It is strange what stands out twenty-five years later.
Not because that was remotely the most important thing that happened that day, but because memory works that way. It preserves flashes.
A television screen.
A phone call.
A crowded gas station.
A feeling in your stomach that something terrible had happened and that nobody yet understood what came next.
I also remember something else from rural East Texas.
I remember Muslim families, Indian and other South Asian families, and people who suddenly had reason to fear that they might be viewed as foreign or suspect quickly putting up American flags.
Some of that, I am sure, was solidarity.
But even then, I understood that some of those flags probably carried another message too:
We are Americans. We are with you. We are not the enemy.
There is something heartbreaking about that memory now.
In a moment when the country had been attacked, some of our neighbors apparently felt the need not only to grieve with us, but to reassure us that they belonged among us.
In a country that had long described itself as a melting pot, some Americans suddenly found themselves feeling as though they needed to prove they belonged.
That, too, is part of what I remember about the days after September 11.
There is a school of thought that says if you did not lose someone that day, if you were not in New York or Washington or Pennsylvania, if the attacks did not alter your life in some direct and personal way, perhaps you should say nothing.
I understand the instinct behind that.
There are people for whom September 11 is not history.
It is the day their husband or wife did not come home.
Their daughter.
Their father.
Their friend.
It is a voicemail saved for decades, an empty chair at the holidays, a child who grew up knowing a parent mostly through photographs and other people’s memories.
Their grief belongs to them.
The rest of us should be careful not to borrow it in order to make ourselves part of the story.
Humans have a tendency to do that.
But I don’t think that means we should be silent.
In fact, twenty-five years later, I think remembering may be more important precisely because fewer of us have a direct connection to what happened.
Memory changes as events move from lived experience into history.
The sharp edges soften.
The images become archival footage.
The names become numbers.
Eventually, a day that once seemed impossible to forget becomes something a generation learns about in a classroom.
That is how time works.
But it is also why remembrance matters.
I remember September 11 not because I believe my experience of that day deserves special attention.
It doesn’t.
I remember because nearly 3,000 individual human beings began an ordinary Tuesday expecting to come home.
They went to work.
They boarded airplanes.
They poured coffee.
They kissed someone goodbye.
They made plans for dinner.
Somewhere else, someone was celebrating a birthday.
And then history arrived without asking anyone’s permission.
There is something almost unbearable about the ordinariness of that morning before everything changed.
But there is another part of that time I find myself thinking about now.
For a moment, the world seemed to pause with us.
People gathered outside American embassies.
Flowers appeared.
Candles were lit.
Strangers thousands of miles away mourned people whose names they would never know.
Our allies stood beside us, but it went beyond governments and treaties.
The day after the attacks, NATO took the unprecedented step of invoking Article 5, its collective-defense provision, for the first time in the alliance’s history.
There was a sense that the attacks in New York and Washington, and the crash of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, had wounded something larger.
The world grieved with the United States.
I do not want to romanticize that moment.
The years that followed were complicated. Decisions were made in the name of September 11 whose consequences we are still reckoning with.
But I cannot look at America’s place in the world twenty-five years ago and compare it with our place in the world today without feeling a profound sadness.
That is not intended as a partisan statement.
It is not about one president, one election, or one political party.
It is simply an observation about something we once possessed in enormous measure: the sympathy, trust, goodwill, and moral standing of much of the world.
Whatever one believes about how it happened, some of that has been lost.
And loss is part of what September 11 asks us to contemplate.
Not only the enormous, irreplaceable loss of human life that morning, but the things that disappeared in its aftermath.
A certain innocence, perhaps.
A sense of security.
Eventually, some of the goodwill the world extended to us when we were wounded.
Fear changed us.
It shaped our politics, our wars, our airports, our surveillance, our attitudes toward one another, and our understanding of security.
And here again I think about those flags in East Texas.
About people who had done nothing wrong feeling the need to visibly demonstrate that they were on our side.
About how quickly fear can turn neighbors into categories.
About how easy it is, when we are frightened, to decide that belonging has to be proven.
Remembering September 11 honestly requires remembering those things too.
Commemoration should not require mythology.
We can honor the people who died without pretending every decision made afterward was wise.
We can admire the heroism of that day without turning tragedy into a political weapon.
We can remember a moment of extraordinary national unity while acknowledging that unity did not extend equally to everyone.
We can remember a time when exploiting a frightened public was met with outrage rather than admiration for the cleverness of the grift.
And we can remember what it felt like when much of the world looked toward the United States not with suspicion or indifference, but with compassion.
Perhaps that is worth mourning too.
There is a difference between saying, this tragedy belongs to me, and saying, these people should not be forgotten.
I did not lose anyone on September 11.
I will not pretend that I understand the grief of those who did.
But today, I will remember them.
I will remember the office workers and the flight attendants, the firefighters and police officers, the people sitting at their desks and the people running toward danger.
And yes, I will remember the animals who worked alongside their handlers in the aftermath.
I will remember the families who have now lived twenty-five years with an absence that never became historical to them.
I will remember the uncertainty.
I will remember those flags.
I will remember a world that, briefly, stopped and grieved with us.
And I will wish my mother a happy birthday.
Because that is the strange thing about history.
Even on the days that change the world, ordinary life keeps existing alongside it.
Birthdays still happen.
Families still gather.
People still love each other.
And somewhere, someone still assumes there will be another Wednesday.
A quarter-century later, remembering that does not feel like saying too much.
It feels like the least we can do.