This year marks the 25th anniversary of a great disaster: the last time I took a college math course. In the fall of 2001, I enrolled in statistics as a prerequisite to a psychology major.
I wound up being utterly defeated by the many formulas that needed to be memorized, often using the same Greek letters that were painted on the steps of U.Va.’s neoclassical buildings, denoting the presence of secret societies.
In both cases, they were equally esoteric to me. Despite having had a great Psych 101 experience with Prof. Jonathan Haidt, after getting a C in statistics, I soon thereafter declared my intention to major in English.
I say this because after 25 years, I recently decided to enroll in another math course — an economics class as part of an MBA program. And I am suddenly getting another case of confounding variables.
But the struggles I currently face with calculus also seem unusually relevant to the current national Zeitgeist, particularly as we reflect on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
This particular anniversary has long been a great opportunity for me, as a writer peddling in current events, to take a sort of national temperature.
Like all those old enough to remember that fateful Tuesday, I have my personal stories related to the confusion of being under attack for the first time in my lifetime on U.S. soil. Would Charlottesville be the next target?
I also remember the coalescing of many in a spirit of national unity and moral clarity, as well as the surge of outrage and adrenaline that helped to propel us into a 21-year military conflict in the Middle East.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, I had the opportunity for the very first time to travel to New York City on a trip that helped to seal my subsequent career path as a journalist. There was a certain poignancy to being in the center of it all and helping to chronicle the action.
For several years since, I have written columns reflecting on 9/11 and its meaning, but like an asymptote in calculus approaching the X axis, it often feels as if there are diminishing returns over time. And the 25th anniversary is no exception.
In past years, I have shared a video mashup of 9/11 footage set to the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s “City of Ruins,” often with the caveat that although Springsteen is a jerk, it is a moment to remember when things did not break down by partisan lines, when we all were one in the same boat.
This year, with his support of domestic terrorism in Minneapolis, Springsteen finally crossed the Rubicon.
But there are other reasons I am not feeling the spirit this year. With the recent Lindsay Clancy mistrial, the repugnant celebrations of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and the sight of socialists like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chuckling at Ground Zero, the entire news cycle feels a bit like a calculus problem that I don’t know the equation to.
Those on the Left are no longer even at the point of debating the evil of killing one’s own children. The storyline has now leapfrogged to whether it is racist to forgive Lindsay Clancy while hypothetically holding black women accountable for acts of filicide.
On the Oprah show, a black woman pleads for others to have the “same passion” for black female child killers, as they do for Lindsay Clancy:
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) September 11, 2026
"There are women of color sitting around this country in prisons. I just wanna remind us to have the pink shirts and the energy for them… pic.twitter.com/dUJ0ZNV710
Meanwhile, the Maria Bartiromo split with Fox News offers a grim reminder that, even with full control of the government and President Donald Trump fully vindicated through the release of classified documents, those on the supposed Right are still stuck on debating whether to talk about what happened in 2020.
If 9/11 marked the culmination of years of blissful ignorance and denialism about the apparent extrinsic threat the country faced from terrorist organizations that most were unaware of, 2020 showed us the threat we faced from within. From the mass formation psychosis that permitted autocratic COVID policies based on lies, to the mob mentality of the BLM movement, to the dubious election and all that followed — by the time of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, our nation stood not unified but on the cusp of total collapse as the war in Afghanistan finally came to a humiliating end.
As anniversaries come and go, it is not the attack itself that bears remembering but the strength and resolve we showed in its aftermath. And it is Nov. 4, 2020, that we must remember as the moment that America finally met its defeat, for a threat we not only fail to remember, but never really addressed in the first place.