A date is a terrible way to remember the worst morning in modern American life. “9/11” tells you only when. It does not tell you who we were, who we are, or who we are meant to be.
I lived through that day. A generation that did not can mark the anniversary, post a flag emoji, and move on. I did not feel, this year, or for the past several, the same widespread public mourning that once bound the country. Worse, some people now treat the attack as someone else’s tragedy; or as a punchline in an ideological war against the America that was struck. Dates fade. Names do not.
That is why I call on President Donald Trump to give September 11 a name and make it a federal holiday: Todd Beamer Day.
STOP SHIELDING THE REAL KILLERS BEHIND 9/11 AND CHARLIE KIRK
Todd Beamer was 32, an Oracle account manager from Cranbury, New Jersey, a husband and father. On United Flight 93 he reached a GTE operator, Lisa Jefferson. He told her the plane had been hijacked. He recited the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. He asked her to tell his family he loved them. Then, as passengers and crew prepared to storm the cockpit, she heard the words that became a national sentence: “Are you guys ready? Okay. Let’s roll.”
The 9/11 Commission later wrote that hijacker-pilot Ziad Jarrah’s objective was “to crash his airliner into symbols of the American Republic, the Capitol or the White House.” Osama bin Laden wanted the White House; plotters also treated the Capitol as the likelier hit. We will never know which building they would have reached. But we know that they never reached Washington. And we know why. The plane went down in a field near Shanksville at 10:03 a.m. Beamer and 39 other passengers and crew died so thousands more might live. That is not a date. That is a character that defined a nation.
The 2,977 death count from the morning itself does not begin to measure the attack. The Islamist operation kept killing. As of this summer, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund has linked about 9,677 deaths among responders and survivors to 9/11-related illness, including 5,892 from cancer. That is more than three times the toll of the day. FDNY has now lost more members to World Trade Center disease than the 343 firefighters killed on the morning itself. I lost a dear friend this year to a 9/11 cancer. She is one name in a ledger that is still growing.
The cancer wave continues to devastate. The World Trade Center Health Program has documented more than 57,000 certified cancer cases. Diagnoses among first responders and others jumped 143% in five years, to 48,579 by 2025. Over the past decade, certifications exploded from 3,204 in 2015 to 57,044 in 2026, a 1,680% rise. Among civilian survivors the ten-year increase has been reported above 3,000%. Northwell Health’s WTC clinic saw certified cancer cases rise 75% between 2023 and 2026. Lung cancer in the cohort has doubled in five years.
The attack did not end when the towers fell. It moved into lungs, blood, and bone.
A date is just a number. It cannot teach a child what America represented that morning. July 4th is not just a date, it is Independence Day. Songs have been written about that description. It evoked images of freedom, bravery, and courage. A date alone could not do that.
Winners write the history books. If we leave 9/11 as a pair of digits, the people who hated what those digits stand for will fill in the meaning.
Some already did, in real time. Reuters filmed Palestinians in East Jerusalem cheering, flashing V-signs, and handing out sweets as the news arrived. In Nablus, about 3,000 people poured into the streets, chanted “God is great,” and passed candy in celebration while gunmen fired in the air. Nawal Abdel Fatah threw sweets and called America “the head of the snake.” In Ein el-Hilweh, Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, revelers fired weapons skyward. Iraqi state television played a song that began “Down with America!” over footage of the towers collapsing. Later years brought Palestinian Authority cartoons that mocked the United States and treated bin Laden as a victor. Those images are not “context.” They are a moral fact: there were people who wanted Americans dead and said so out loud.
I will not pretend that every critic of American policy danced on that day. I will not pretend that no one now excuses the same death cult in the language of “resistance,” or that jihadist ideology and the campus fashion for treating Western civilization as the original sin have nothing to say to each other. A country that cannot name its enemy cannot teach its children why the values of Flight 93; ordinary citizenship, faith under pressure, the refusal to sit still while murderers fly the plane are worth keeping.
Memorials already exist: the Wall of Names in Shanksville, Panel S-68 in New York, a high school in Federal Way, a student center at Wheaton, a park in Fresno, a boulder in Cranbury that still says “Let’s Roll.”
But a federal holiday named for Beamer would send every classroom to those places and to the man. It would force the next generation to look up a civilian who acted like the Founders’ wager depended on him. Because it did.
AFTER 9/11, WE PROTECTED MUSLIMS. AFTER OCT. 7, ELITE COLLEGES BETRAYED JEWS
September 11 should never stop mourning the innocents. But it should also teach courage, American resilience, and our national values. A date cannot do that work forever. A name can.
Trump should proclaim it, and Congress should write it into law: Todd Beamer Day. Give America’s darkest morning a face, a sentence, and a standard. Let’s roll.
Jeffrey Lax is a professor of law at the City University of New York and the founder of S.A.F.E. Campus. He holds a J.D. from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a master’s degree from Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business. Professor Lax is a frequent legal and political commentator on Fox News, Newsmax, and other major media outlets and is active on X at @CUNY_Prof.