What we forget when we remember 9/11

I have always felt unsure about what those words mean. For those of us who were alive in 2001, forgetting the day itself is almost impossible.

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I remember the shock and fear, the replays of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center, and the moment the second tower fell. I remember seeing on television the missing-person photographs that covered New York and the awful recognition that very few of those people were likely to be found alive. I remember the bravery of the New York firefighters and police.

My college students have no such memories or feelings. Most were born years after September 11, 2001.

They encounter what happened through photographs, documentaries, memorials, classroom lessons, and stories told by people who were alive on that day. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum estimates that about 100 million Americans have been born since the attacks.

The shift is ordinary and still somehow startling. An event that once felt like it had split time into a permanent before and after is fading into history itself.

In my work as a professor of politics and public affairs, I pay close attention to the stories Americans tell about their past and the ways those stories shape civic identity in the present. The 25th anniversary of 9/11 is especially interesting to me because it marks a moment when an event once experienced as immediate and world-changing is increasingly being carried forward through memory, ritual, and interpretation.

Understanding history includes forgetting

Scholars of collective memory, also called public memory, have long argued that societies do not remember the past simply by preserving it.

Public memory describes how collective meaning gets made and remade through stories, institutions, rituals, and political arguments. For example, the Department of Homeland Security was created in response to 9/11. Many Americans understand DHS as a structural and cultural reform made to fix the intelligence failures that the attacks made evident.

Forgetting is part of the process, too. As memory scholar Paul Connerton has argued, some forms of forgetting are not failures but necessary parts of social life.

No individual, school, or nation can keep everything equally present forever. History accumulates faster than collective memory can accommodate it. The question, then, is not whether Americans will forget parts of 9/11. They will. The more interesting question is what remains after that forgetting.

From the first anniversary, commemorating the attacks has carried a careful choreography. There is the annual reading of the names of those who died, the memorial lights, and the stories of first responders, each of which keeps the day's human loss and courage in view.

In a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, 76% of Americans named 9/11 as one of the 10 most consequential events of their lifetimes. Nearly 1 in 5 said the nation’s immediate response to the attacks was the moment when they felt most proud of the United States.

I understand those points of view. Some of what I most want preserved about September 11 is the shared grief of those first days and the ways ordinary people revealed their humanity under unimaginable circumstances.

Firefighters climbed stairs and ran toward mortal danger, while a cascade of people tried as hard as they could to get down. Office workers helped colleagues and strangers. Families searched for missing loved ones long after hope had become terribly thin. And passengers on United Flight 93 fought back and forced the plane they were on to crash in a field in the middle of Pennsylvania, sacrificing themselves in the hopes of saving others.

Before 9/11 became a justification, a policy, a war, or a political symbol, it was an experience of shared human vulnerability.

Politics and its consequences

No event remains sealed inside its original meaning. September 11 became the starting point for a series of political choices that reshaped American life and, in turn, reshaped the memory of the day itself.

The attacks led to the war in Afghanistan, which lasted for 20 years after the invasion’s initial success in dismantling al-Qaida and removing the Taliban government.

Next was the invasion of Iraq, even though Saddam Hussein’s regime had no role in 9/11.

And the aftermath of the attacks helped create an atmosphere that allowed for expanding government surveillance, enlarging presidential power, and narrowing the space for dissent. Muslim Americans found themselves subjected to new suspicion and hostility.

Those consequences now compete with the original experience of September 11 for a place in its meaning.

For some Americans, the attacks have become inseparable from the wars and broader official willingness to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of security that followed. From this perspective, 9/11 is remembered not only as a national trauma but also as a warning about how fear and grief can make policies that once seemed unthinkable appear necessary.

For others, the day – and its aftermath – represent restored American pride and military perseverance.

For still others, 9/11 remains most powerfully a story about innocent lives lost and ordinary people behaving with extraordinary courage.

Each way of remembering draws a boundary around the terrorism the nation experienced, deciding how far beyond that September morning its meaning should extend.

Even events once regarded as world-defining eventually have to share the historical landscape with everything that follows. Since 2001, Americans have experienced Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, the election of the first Black president, the rise of Donald Trump, the violence on January 6, 2021, and a global pandemic.

September 11 has not become unimportant because of those things. Its place in the story has changed because life – because the world – kept going.

For people who were alive during the attacks, there is something sad about watching that distance and diminishment happen. When an event once remembered in minute detail becomes a date others know only from history, the passage of one’s own life becomes newly visible. There is a strange nostalgia in realizing that something once so immediate now belongs increasingly to people who know it only as the past.

What are we to remember?

Maybe this is why “never forget” feels both moving and impossible.

What is supposed to be the subject of our remembering? The people who died? The courage? The grief? The fear? The wars that followed? The mistakes? The unexpected decency of people thrown together on an unbearable day?

A society cannot keep all of those things equally vivid forever. Nor should its members confuse remembering everything with understanding anything. The task of collective memory is inevitably one of selection.

For me, one part of the memory seems especially important to preserve. Before September 11 became an argument about war, security, patriotism, or political allegiance, it was an encounter with human vulnerability and then human resilience. The solidarity of September 11 and the political choices made in its aftermath were not the same thing, even if they have become intertwined in our memory of the period.

If the ongoing march of history means September 11 cannot always carry the emotional weight it does for people who were alive when it happened, perhaps the best outcome would be to focus on the collective grief, along with the extraordinary human response that grief engendered.

Doing so would not erase any of what followed. But it might help preserve the understanding that the day was one of unimaginable horror and tragedy before it became a political inheritance.

Key Points:

• Apopka’s 9/11 Memorial Service begins at 8:30 am. Friday outside City Hall.
• The Apopka Fire and Police Departments will host the observance.
• The American flag will be lowered to half-staff in remembrance of those who died.
• The 2026 observance marks 25 years since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
• The accompanying commentary explores how Americans preserve the day’s grief, courage, and meaning as firsthand memory fades.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.