I was 9 years old, in my second week of middle school, 25 miles from lower Manhattan when the world changed.
I remember being gathered on the carpeted floor of our homeroom when the principals aide delivered a note to our teacher. She read it to us with a perplexed look on her face, unaware that the plane she described as having been involved in a tragic accident had passed just a few miles from our school along the Hudson River only minutes earlier.
Wed soon learn this was no accident.
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We were too young to understand the magnitude of what was happening, but old enough to know something was terribly wrong. For millennials, September 11, 2001 was the moment that divided our lives into “before” and “after.”
There is an innocence in the photographs and memories from before 9/11 that is hard to explain. The people and the streets look the same, but everything feels different because we know what they did not yet know was about to happen.
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And in the weeks and months after that tragic day, everything changed. We remember the anthrax scares, the new airport security measures, and the fear that another attack could happen at any moment.
But we should remember something else, too: the extraordinary sense of unity that followed. For a kid growing up just outside New York City, the shared sense of patriotism and American flags seemingly everywhere is impossible to forget. In those days, before social media became a force for division and politics consumed so much of our national conversation, Americans seemed determined to stand together.
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I still vividly remember watching President George W. Bushs first pitch before Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium a little over a month after the attacks. In a city still grieving, our leader in a bulletproof vest humming a strike right down the middle felt like a small but powerful sign that America was still standing, too.
But 25 years later, September 11 is becoming history rather than memory. For a younger generation, it is increasingly just a chapter in a textbookâor worse, fodder for internet conspiracy theories, memes and jokes.
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We cannot let that happen.
As the last generation to have firsthand memories of September 11, it is incumbent on us to remind younger Americans of the extraordinary things ordinary Americans did when confronted with the unimaginable that fateful day.
If youve visited any of the three September 11 memorial sites â the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York, the Pentagon Memori
