Although it often feels like it just happened, 25 years have passed since the awful day that, for my generation, separated “before” from “after.”
On that gorgeous morning, with a very blue sky overhead, I stood yanking weeds outside my Connecticut home after walking my son to school. A neighbor popped her head out across the street and yelled, “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”
With an ache in my heart, I went inside and flipped on the television just in time to see the previously unimaginable: a plane driving into the second tower. A fireball filled the screen.
It looked too much like a bad movie to be real. Yet as fire and smoke poured from each of those familiar skyscrapers, the realization dawned that thousands could be dead, or soon would be, and that none of this was accidental.
I’d never seen anything so horrible. For days, I couldn’t get the images out of my head: buildings tumbling down, floor by floor, in a rumble of dust, steel and flesh.
In the months and years that followed, my family visited Ground Zero in Manhattan, saw the charred walls on the shattered side of the Pentagon and paid homage at the gash in a Pennsylvania farm field where heroic passengers brought down one of the four hijacked planes. It simply felt like something we had to do.
As a nation, we have, as we tend to, moved on. Those piles of smoking debris at each site have become stirring memorials to the people whose lives were lost.
With that said, I think that invisible scars remain. If nothing else, America has been left with a lingering concern that even on the best, brightest days, something dark might intrude.
We’re not the same country we were before 9/11.
So much of what has happened in the past 25 years is rooted in those brief hours when 19 hijackers turned passenger planes into missiles aimed at the heart of America, including war that sent our young men and women into a hodgepodge of troubled countries. We couldn’t even say coherently why we were there.
And here at home? We have quietly accepted a growing cadre of armed agents, security lines, cameras and metal detectors. We’ve let our fears form our policies.
At its best, America is a nation that embraces hope and eagerly races toward the future, sometimes with such haste that it forgets too much about how it got to be the way it is. We are capable of a vibrancy that can be astonishing.
But we haven’t been at our best in a long while.
I can’t help thinking that some of what holds us back is the lingering recollection of how a squad of terrorists struck so successfully 25 years ago, bringing down a commercial center and leaving part of our military command center in ruins.
Langston Hughes, one of our great poets, wrote of the need to “let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed – Let it be that great strong land of love” where “opportunity is real, and life is free.”
As a Black man in a racist place, he knew how often America tends to fall short. But he knew, too, what might be — what can still be.