9/11, 25 years on: For 100 million Americans, it’s not even a memory

SHANKSVILLE, Pennsylvania – It is always the first thought that arises when recollecting an event of great import: Where was I? What humdrum action was I engaged in when it occurred?And time seems to coalesce around a momentous event, slowing it down.For me, the news of the first plane crashing into a building in New York broke nearly at the end of my day shift, at 8.46PM, Singapore time. Seventeen minutes later, live on television, another plane ploughed in. The Straits Times foreign desk, led by the late Felix Soh, scrambled to capture the shock that rippled across the globe when 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists, four of whom trained as pilots, hijacked four passenger jets and flew them, like missiles, into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Within three hours after the first plane struck, an iconic pair of New York’s tallest buildings were reduced to a smoky pile of rubble, a part of America’s military headquarters had collapsed, and 40 brave passengers and crew had died thwarting a flight believed to have been bound for Capitol Hill or the White House. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the most brutal terrorist attacks that came to define a new era. Among them were more than 370 foreigners from over 100 countries. One Singaporean recounted her miraculous escape in an interview in 2021.The nation shook at the magnitude of the attacks, which were clearly the result of unprecedented coordination. Firefighters, police officers, and paramedics risked their lives in desperate rescue operations; all flights were grounded, and many Americans learnt for the first time about Al-Qaeda and its chief, Osama bin Laden. It was the wee hours of the next morning when we put the newspaper to bed. I have little trouble recalling The Straits Times page 1 headline, 25 years later: “Terrorists bring US to its knees.”Barely 10 days later, after air traffic had resumed in the US, I was in New York on a trip planned months earlier. I stood next to the barricades and yellow crime-scene tape cordoning off the rubble, breathing in the haze of dust hanging over the site like a white, nebulous shroud. Fliers and posters with names and photos of missing people were everywhere.The Pentagon has since been repaired. New York’s new tallest building is a new World Trade Center at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. The city, which has kept the twin towers’ footprints as an open memorial, this year inaugurated its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani.But formidable new challenges have sprung up. The 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks finds the US at a crossroads: how to deal with a threat that remains salient while public memory of its horror dims. A young child taking a picture at the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93. ST PHOTO: BHAGYASHREE GAREKARCurrent threat assessments say that a variety of loose networks and home-grown, radicalised lone wolf actors pose “the most likely terrorist attack scenario” on the US homeland. And counter-terrorism experts have warned that the time between radicalisation and violent action has shortened over the past 25 years.But nearly 100 million Americans, born after the attacks, are unfamiliar with the horror of this shared national memory. They are emotionally distant from the attacks they never witnessed. And the messaging from the White House is not as sharp as it used to be.The Biden administration minimised talking about the “global war on terror” and instead focused on the great power competition with Russia and China. The second Trump administration doubled down.Its 2026 counter-terrorism strategy talks about a “resource-sustainable approach to countering Islamic terrorists”, focused on organisations with the intent and capability to strike the homeland. Some analysts call it a doctrinal and rhetorical downgrade of the war on terror, while supporters call it a realistic recalibration. Lately, the White House has also been trying to persuade the world that by far the most dangerous form of extremism is far-left violence. In May 2026, it explicitly elevated “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists” to the same tier as “legacy Islamist terrorists” – like Al-Qaeda and ISIS – and drug cartels. In July, the US State Department convened foreign ministers for a meeting to warn of the resurgence of “political terrorism” and said far-left actors now drive the majority of anti-government plots and attacks.A war of wordsWith the passage of time, alternative views of the attacks have surfaced more readily, troubling those who do not want their horror to be diluted.Less than two weeks before the milestone anniversary, Americans were outraged when a leaked internal memo showed that Canada’s public broadcaster had asked its journalists not to refer to the 9/11 attacks as “terrorism”. After a backlash, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reversed the decision.Barely had that controversy died down when Mamdani came into the public glare.During an event on Sept 4, he handed over the ceremonial pen that he used to sign executive orders commemorating the attacks to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who has fought the case of Ahmed al-Darbi, a convicted Al-Qaeda terrorist implicated in the 2002 bombing of a French oil tanker and whose brother-in-law was one of the hijackers who flew the plane into the Pentagon. Critics also pounced on Mamdani for having made an appearance with far-left influencer Hasan Piker and his initial hesitation to condemn Piker’s remarks that “America deserved 9/11”.The way he has framed the attacks in his public statements over the years has spurred scrutiny.Conservative commentators say he has criticised US foreign policy and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq more than he has blamed the perpetrators while discussing 9/11. He has mourned the victims while avoiding a clear statement saying that Al-Qaeda terrorists carried out the attacks. Families of 9/11 victims have collected over 100,000 signatures for a petition that asks Mamdani to stay away from the commemoration ceremony on Sept 11. Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on terrorism and senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution think-tank, said there are two phenomena in public perceptions of terrorism.“One is the different messaging from the US government, and the other is just the distance from that experience,” she said.“The Trump administration has redirected its effort to countering what it defines as far-left extremism and what many allege is essentially a political beachhead against domestic actors in the US that don’t agree with it,” she added.An analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on “Ideological trends in US terrorism” found that while the number of left-wing terrorist attacks have increased over the last decade, they still remain much lower than far-right and Islamist attacks.The US continues to experience instances of lone wolf, self-radicalising actors seeking to mount attacks, Felbab-Brown said. These happen regularly but have been foiled or not resulted in large casualties. “The shock that the 9/11 attacks brought is long gone. At the same time, there is tiredness with the 20-plus years of the global war on terror that took US soldiers to faraway places, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and that led to thousands of soldiers dying.”Worsening things is the ongoing war with Iran, which has accomplished none of the US’ objectives and caused great economic distress at home. “So both the emotional distance and the ongoing costs related to complex wars are turning off people from seeing counter-terrorism as their principal foreign policy focus,” Felbab-Brown added.It is an especially confusing landscape for the 100 million Americans who know about the attacks only second-hand.A majority of young Americans, between 18 and 24 years of age, say they first learnt about the attacks in school, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 5,166 US adults conducted in August.That brings its own problems. Public schools vary widely in what and how much they teach about 9/11. Only 25 states have laws or standards requiring specific instruction related to 9/11. Another 13 states make it optional, according to an Associated Press report. Since most decisions are left to school districts and to individual teachers, coverage is uneven.Older students may be asked to assess government responses to terrorism and analyse the aftermath of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, including the erroneous allegations about weapons of mass destruction.Some states require the students also learn about attacks on mosques and a Supreme Court case on the legal rights of US citizens, including Muslims, detained as “enemy combatants”. Teaching the teachersIn Pennsylvania, a 2024 law requires schools to hold a moment of silence and urges schools to use the anniversary as a teachable moment.The state had a close brush with terrorism. A site spread over 890ha of meadows, reclaimed coal mines and forests in Shanksville, south-western Pennsylvania, honours the 33 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants who attempted to retake the plane from the Al-Qaeda hijackers.United Flight 93 took off from New Jersey’s Newark airport, 25 minutes late, for San Francisco on that fateful day. After 46 minutes in the air, four hijackers overpowered the captain and turned the plane towards Washington. Passengers and crew learnt about other hijacked planes in phone calls made from “seat phones” in those days when mobile phones were still uncommon. In all, 13 people placed 37 calls. Realising that their plane was part of the plot, they took a vote and decided to storm the cockpit. The cockpit voice recorder captured the sounds of the struggle before the plane crashed and erupted in a giant fireball, at a site that is 18 minutes flying distance from the US capital. All aboard died.Some 10,000 people, including the families of those who died, are expected to turn up to honour the heroes on Sept 11 at the Flight 93 National Memorial.Crowds at the visitors’ centre at the Flight 93 National Memorial, a site that honours the 40 passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93. ST PHOTO: BHAGYASHREE GAREKARThe weekend before the ceremony, on a hot day with clear blue skies, visitors thronged the site. The carpark overflowed, and queues moved slowly past exhibits at the visitor’s centre overlooking the crash site. There were fathers with toddlers on shoulders, grandparents with wide-eyed preteens, grey-haired military veterans, some in wheelchairs, and groups of tattooed motorcycle riders in stars-and-stripes tees. Some left flowers by the marble “Wall of Names”, inscribed with the names of those who died. I saw personal tributes: a Spider-Man figurine, an angel with wings and a large clamshell.Objects left as tributes for the 40 passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93. ST PHOTO: BHAGYASHREE GAREKAR“Around 30 per cent of our population has no lived memory of the day,” noted Donna Gibson, the executive director of Friends of Flight 93, a non-profit organisation dedicated to awareness, education and stewardship at the memorial. “And you not only have students who have no memory, (but also) you now have educators who either were not alive or have no lived memory of the day,” she said.Four years ago, the non-profit partnered with the National Park Service to create “National Days of Learning” to remember 9/11. “We have a global platform where people can register, participate in projects and learn about what happened on that day,” she said.A new project launched in 2026 was a symposium for Pennsylvania’s social studies teachers, organised by the University of Pittsburgh School of Education, the Friends of Flight 93 National Memorial, and the National Park Service. The aim was ambitious: to establish a national model for 9/11 education. The central problem is not a lack of curriculum but preparation for teachers to handle the subject’s emotional weight, said Melissa Nelson, an assistant professor of practice at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education, who led workshops at the symposium.University of Pittsburgh School of Education assistant professor of practice Melissa Nelson speaking during a session at the “Teaching With Courage: 9/11 and the Legacy of Flight 93” educator symposium in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. PHOTO: UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF EDUCATION“There is the teaching of the factual aspect of something so consequential as 9/11, and then there is the opportunity that we have as adults to model for children how we make sense of terrible things that happen,” she said.“Teachers are responsible for teaching about one of the worst days in our nation’s history. This is horrific to make sense of; how do you wrap your head around people who hate our country so much that they want to collapse it? That’s scary for us as adults to understand, let alone a 14-year-old.“It was also one of the last times when we seemed to be able to move past our many differences and see the humanity in each other,” she noted.“And that’s something very important that educators can model for children. That even in the worst of times we can support each other.”Merely conveying the facts is itself a missed opportunity for deeper education, she said.“You might as well hand them a book. It just doesn’t resonate and it misses opportunities to explore emotional perspectives.“You can’t let the children walk out your classroom door with no hope that they can be part of changing the trajectory of their futures,” she said.“We must not leave them so overwhelmed by something like 9/11 that they are living in fear. Let them leave with some hope. That is my one golden rule.”