Time heals all wounds. A saying we've heard throughout our lives. For the most part, it holds. Pain doesn't subside after loss, of course, but time marches on, and the tears become fewer. The happy memories supplant the grief.
Why is that not happening when we reflect on the horrific terror attacks on 9/11? Why does the grief feel heavier, the haze in the coming days harder to clear?
The easy answer is the scale of the attack. The numbers are seared into our minds forever. It was a day when 19 hijackers, four airplanes, two towers, and one deranged ideology brought the threat of terrorism to the forefront in our country, taking 2,977 innocent lives in the process.
But the fog seems deeper than that. The grief, at times, feels harder for those of us who witnessed the events that day to cope with year after year. Time isn't blunting the shock and pain. Instead, watching documentaries and memorials is doing the opposite.
Why? The contrast. The contrast with the knowledge of the current divide.
When viewers watch video footage of the attacks, most who experienced them in real time are instantly transported back to that day. It feels exactly as it did on 9/11, 2001. This eventually leads to thoughts of September 12th and the days immediately following.
That's when American flags went up everywhere. Congress stood on the Capitol steps and sang “God Bless America.” A president who had just won a disputed election suddenly had rarely seen positive approval ratings.
People who had been arguing about hanging chads the year before were suddenly standing in the same blood drives, shoulder to shoulder at the same candlelight vigils. First responders from across the country drove toward disaster, eager to help, eschewing their own health and safety. Ordinary people were kinder to strangers for months.
We promised never to forget. We promised to secondarily identify as Democrats and Republicans, but first and foremost as Americans.
While the days or even months afterward offered that kind of hope, the years since have seen a slow, debilitating corrosion of everything we thought this nation would become as it quite literally arose from the ashes.
Since then, it's been a long series of poor choices as a nation that has completely spent the capital of that moment. The wars that began with near-unanimous support became grinding, expensive, and politically radioactive. Debates that should have been about how a free society maintains promised liberties in the face of this new threat turned into political purity tests. All while trust in institutions that had spiked after the attacks began a long decline that has yet to reverse. Polarization reconstituted and calcified.
A recent survey shows that respondents who feel “extremely proud” of their country have hit shockingly low levels. Viewing the old footage through that lens, seeing how far we’ve fallen as a nation, hurts.
You hear “never forget” spoken with genuine grief in 2001. And it hits you just as it did that day. But you simultaneously realize we have indeed forgotten. The country that formed in the hours after the towers fell did not hold.
George W. Bush, who famously rallied the nation while standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center and declaring through a bullhorn that the radical Islamic terrorists would "hear all of us soon," just a day before the 25th anniversary of the attacks, pushed the false notion that "Islam is the religion of peace."
🇺🇸 September 14, 2001. Ground Zero.
— Barnaby Breaks History 🇺🇸 (@BarnabyHistory) September 8, 2026
President Bush climbed onto a wrecked fire truck with a retired FDNY man named Bob Beckwith and a bullhorn.
A worker in the pile yelled that he could not hear him.
Bush: “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And… pic.twitter.com/srHiO6YdVn
That man, having lived that experience, trying to Muslim-wash reality, is a travesty. One of the biggest mistakes we, as a nation, made following 9/11 was allowing milquetoast politicians and the media, deliberately playing useful idiots to radical Islam, to refuse to call out the ideology that led to the attack.
Islam isn't the religion of peace. It's the religion of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the USS Cole bombing in 2000, and the Fort Hood massacre in 2009. It is the religion of the Charlie Hebdo siege. The Paris train, Brussels airport, and Nice truck attacks. The Berlin Christmas market.
That's a short list.
And of course, September 11th. Crazy religious fanatics filled with rage, promoted within the Islamic religion, carried these out. We should never be afraid to say that. But we have been. So terrified have Americans become of being labeled Islamophobic that they have, with increasing frequency, placed radicals who sympathize with the terrorists in positions of power.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI-12) has demonstrated ties to individuals and organizations linked to U.S.-designated terrorist groups. Groups such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). She has voiced support for Houthi rebels in Yemen, a radical Islamist group that is allied with Iran.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN-5) has done her best to reduce 9/11 to "some people did something" while equating American armed forces to the Taliban.
Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) once openly expressed a lifelong "obligation" to follow Sharia law in certain aspects of life and currently pals around with an influencer who has openly stated that "America deserved 9/11."
Speaking of that influencer, Hasan Piker is also a close ally of New York City's mayor, a radical, terrorist-adjacent Muslim named Zohran Kwame Mamdani. It's difficult to comprehend that the city that suffered the most through 9/11 elected someone who praised Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, blamed the United States for radicalizing al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, appointed a chief counsel who previously defended an al-Qaeda terrorist, and has endorsed candidates who have minimized 9/11.
Never forget.
Mamdani and AOC are spotted laughing with each other as people cry while the names of those who died are read during the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. pic.twitter.com/Ib5lm57fmV
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 11, 2026
That's why this day feels so heavy. Simultaneous reels play in our minds — one of the horrific day, one of the optimism in the aftermath, and one of the present-day failure to uphold American values and stand strong against what divides.
We once rose up to defeat the enemy, but have since fallen prey to them once again. Our minds are left to comprehend that dichotomy. And for that, we owe the victims of 9/11 an apology and a promise to get back to where we once were as a united nation. Perhaps then America can finally move forward.
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