What we choose to remember about 9/11

PUBLISHED: September 10, 2026 | www.baltimoresun.com

In a rare moment while thinking about and finally writing this commentary, I actually wept.

I wept for the lives taken, the children left behind and the final telephone calls that became permanent goodbyes. I wept because every September, America returns to a morning that never truly ended.

We remember the blue sky, so clear, so ordinary, so undeserving of what was about to be written across it. We remember the planes, the fire, the collapsing towers and the great cloud of ash that swallowed streets once alive with taxis, coffee carts, hurried footsteps and morning conversations. We remember the Pentagon burning. We remember Flight 93 falling into a Pennsylvania field after ordinary passengers made an extraordinary decision: If they were going to die, they would not allow more innocent people to die with them.

We read the names. We ring bells. We lower flags.

But remembrance must be more than ceremony. If we remember only the horror and not the forces that produced it, we reduce history to an anniversary instead of receiving it as a warning.

Nearly 3,000 human beings were murdered on Sept. 11, 2001. They were executives and custodians, firefighters and police officers, military personnel and airline crews. They were Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, believers and nonbelievers. They came from more than 90 countries. Some were beginning careers. Some were nearing retirement. Some had argued with a spouse that morning and expected to apologize that evening. Some had packed lunches for children they would never hold again.

That is the unbearable cruelty of terrorism: It does not merely take lives. It steals every unwritten chapter attached to those lives.

Children grew up with photographs where parents should have been. Families preserved final voice messages as sacred relics. Firehouses kept empty lockers. Dinner tables held invisible guests. Thousands escaped the buildings but carried that morning in their lungs, their sleep and their memories. First responders who ran toward death later developed cancers and respiratory diseases from the toxic air they breathed while searching for survivors and human remains.

The attack was committed by men who had been methodically indoctrinated into believing mass murder was a sacred duty. Their minds had been narrowed until innocent people became symbols, murder became obedience and death became reward.

We must say this clearly: Faith did not fly those planes. Human beings did; human beings who surrendered conscience to fanaticism and allowed religion to be weaponized by those seeking power, control and destruction.

No authentic encounter with God requires the slaughter of strangers. No heaven is opened by murdering office workers, children, flight attendants or firefighters. Any ideology that teaches a person to silence compassion, abandon reason and celebrate innocent suffering has ceased to be a path toward God. It has become an instrument of evil.

Indoctrination works by steadily shrinking the human heart. It divides the world into the pure and the impure, the faithful and the condemned, “us” and “them.” It discourages questions because questions threaten control. It replaces individual conscience with collective obedience. Eventually, the victim is no longer seen as a mother, neighbor, child or friend, but as an obstacle whose destruction can be justified.

That danger did not disappear with Osama bin Laden. It remains wherever people are taught that disagreement makes others less human. It lives in extremist cells, but it can also appear in political movements, racial hatred, conspiracy cultures and digital communities that reward rage. The methods differ, but the seduction is familiar: Your pain is someone else’s fault. Your group is righteous. Your enemies are evil. Violence is not merely permissible; it is necessary.

Sept. 11 teaches us that ideas have consequences. Lies, repeated long enough, can become permission slips for cruelty.

Yet that terrible day revealed another truth: Human beings are capable of astonishing courage. Firefighters climbed upward while thousands descended. Police officers entered buildings others were fleeing. Strangers carried strangers. Passengers resisted hijackers despite knowing the probable cost. Americans stood in lines to donate blood. Houses of worship opened their doors. For a brief moment, divisions that had seemed permanent became embarrassingly small.

We discovered that heroism is not always announced by trumpets. Sometimes it is a hand reaching through smoke. Sometimes it is a final telephone call saying, “I love you.” Sometimes it is a person who is terrified but moves toward danger anyway because someone else needs help.

The question now is not simply whether we remember Sept. 11. The question is what our remembrance produces.

Does it deepen our humanity or harden our prejudices? Does it honor the dead or merely repeat familiar words? Do we teach young people only what happened, or do we teach them how indoctrination happens, how grievance becomes hatred, hatred becomes dehumanization and dehumanization becomes murder?

We must remember without becoming consumed by vengeance. We must remain vigilant without treating entire religions or peoples as guilty. Millions of Muslims rejected the terrorists’ perversion of Islam. Muslim Americans were among those murdered that day and among those who served afterward. Moral clarity requires us to condemn extremism precisely, without surrendering to another form of collective hatred.

The memorial pools at Ground Zero are carved into absence. Water falls endlessly into spaces where towers once stood, as though the earth itself is still grieving. Around them are names, each one a universe, each one proof that history is never merely about numbers.

Twenty-five years later, the most meaningful tribute is not simply to look backward. It is to guard the human conscience against those who would capture it. It is to teach faith without fanaticism, patriotism without hatred, strength without cruelty and remembrance without fear.

Perhaps that is why I wept. The tears were not only for what America lost that morning, but for what those nearly 3,000 souls might have become: the birthdays never celebrated, the children never raised, the apologies never spoken and the love stories never completed.

The towers fell. But courage rose.

And our solemn responsibility is to ensure that memory, truth and our shared humanity continue to rise with it.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

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