After 9/11, country music star Alan Jackson wrote a haunting song, “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?” A full 90% of Americans over 30 know — do you?
My own 9/11 memory is wracked with survivor’s guilt. If not for a last-minute change of travel plans to guest on a late-night political talk show, I would have been on American Airlines Flight 77 when it was flown into the Pentagon by a group of demonic jihadi murderers.
Like my own, the collective response of my generation to this anniversary is painfully visceral. It is indeed a shared form of national PTSD.
But memory does not automatically pass from one generation to the next. It has to be shared, and with every passing year, fewer Americans have a lived memory of Sept. 11, 2001, and recollection of its terror.
Roughly 100 million Americans (30%) were born after 9/11, and another 7% were under the age of 5 that day. For them, September 11 is a series of detached images of airplanes, falling towers, and survivors covered in soot running toward safety. They know the basic facts. But many have not internalized the story.
They don’t feel the story.
The question is how to impart, with intentional and deliberate national purpose, what we endured to a generation that wonders why parents or grandparents cry through 9/11 remembrance shows every year.
The ultimate lesson of 9/11 is the unending requirement for national vigilance, preparedness, and protection of freedoms. The danger did not disappear when the smoke cleared from Ground Zero.
National security, lawful and controlled immigration, vigilance against violent Islamist extremism, and opposition to Sharia law remain essential. America cannot allow any of these to undermine the freedoms and constitutional principles that define it, or it will fall like the towers.
According to a recent Harvard Youth Poll, young Americans see themselves in an era of political extremism and declining faith in institutions that bind a free society. Add the woke ethos of universities and social media that presents violent aggressors as misunderstood victims, and the result is a generation either numb to terror threats or marginally sympathetic to the perpetrators.
That generational distance matters when viewing the disturbing enthusiasm some younger Americans show for candidates like Zohran Mamdani and Abdul el Sayed. New York voters under 29 put Mamdani over the top with 75% of their votes, and el Sayed is tapping into the disaffection captured in the Harvard poll with his outreach to younger generations.
That so many young people are buying into anti-liberty, destructive, and radical politicians’ messages, and that of the Democratic Socialists of America, is an indictment of the country’s collective memory and shows the danger of historical amnesia.
Freedom still means the right to worship, speak, and live under laws that protect individual liberty. Religious tyranny, such as Islamic extremism, replaces those freedoms with submission enforced by coercion.
Young Americans should understand that distinction — not as an abstract political argument, but as one of the central lessons of 9/11. If they understand what was attacked, what was defended, and what remains at stake, they will be prepared to carry the torch of freedom forward.
It is incumbent on those who do remember to retell it from the most personal place possible. How hard they cried. How frightened they were. How they honored those who signed up to take the fight to the terrorists in the ensuing weeks.
We must share ourselves, not just photos. Because no matter where we were that day, we are all part of the story, and our personal memories make history real in a way textbooks cannot.
Nearly 40% of today’s population is over 50. We won’t be here forever to share why remembering 9/11 will always matter for the preservation of a free America.
Our memories must be passed along by talking about 9/11 around the dinner table, watching shows marking the event (age-appropriately, of course) with young family members, and expressing personal feelings during each frame.
We cannot simply ask a generation that did not experience 9/11 to “never forget” something they didn’t live through, but give them their own personal reasons to remember.
It is a burden, but also a sacred responsibility. The attack did not just leave a mark on those in New York, D.C., or Shanksville, but on mom and dad, aunt and uncle, grandma and grandpa, as we sat for a week straight staring in irreversible disbelief at our TV screens.
THE LEFT IS GASLIGHTING YOU ABOUT ABDUL EL SAYED’S 9/11 POSTS
Even for those who don’t remember, 9/11 is their legacy.
And that legacy will be the future of our country. Because the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance and a torch that can only pass through the lessons of history.
Kerri Toloczko is a senior fellow at the Institute for Liberty.