09/11/2026
Do you remember where you were on this day 25 years ago? Even for the majority of us who didn't watch the towers fall in real time, we can still tell you exactly where we were, who was around, the look and feeling of unease in the atmosphere as the nation slowly shut down that day.
The fear and uncertainty in the air were tangible at work, school, and elsewhere, as a panicked populace calmly tried to figure out what to do next. It was a day of rare and profound vulnerability for the American people, and the grief deserves compassion and remembrance.
But grief was too quickly weaponized, and what we did next--though it would change the course of history--was NOT what we should've done. Rather than taking a moment to reflect on peace, the attacks became a justification for war. The Bush administration declared a “War on Terror” that would expand American military presence across the globe. The invasion of Afghanistan, launched in October 2001, became a fruitless, two-decade occupation. And in 2003, the pretext of “weapons of mass destruction” (the OG of fake news) led to the war in Iraq. Together, these wars killed and displaced millions, destabilized entire regions, and drained trillions of taxpayer dollars.
At home, the Patriot Act expanded the surveillance, racial profiling, and detention without trial, all in the name of "security". Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities bore the brunt of suspicion and state repression. Again, what was framed as security became an erosion of civil liberties and a blank check for militarism, setting the stage for much of hat we see on our streets today.
9/11 should remind us of the human cost of violence, but it should also remind us of the danger of uncritical patriotism in the face of trauma, and the extent of the violence that we as a nation spread so glibly across the globe. The wars we waged in the name of 9/11 inflicted suffering on a far deadlier scale.
The U.S. government leveraged the tragedy to secure oil in the Middle East and expand its military reach, with the bonus of suppressing dissent at home.
We can honor and commemorate those we lost in the attacks, but have we learned from it?
