From the dark hours of 9/11, choosing light

Everyone has a story. And, as longtime Monitor staff photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman shares in her photo essay, “Everyone of a certain age has a story from 9/11.”For a quarter of a century, those stories and memories have offered inspiring lessons on individual courage and civic unity – as well as hard ones about international and national politics. They’ve nurtured hope and trust in humanity’s remarkable resilience, the ability to recover and rebuild from loss and grief. But they’ve also sown seeds of fear and distrust – in others and in the future.As it does each year, the anniversary of 9/11 confronts Americans with subtle and challenging choices: what values to hold on to, what dark memories to let go of, how best to move forward?Friday marks 25 years since that clear blue day in 2001, when terrorists hijacked four airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon near Washington, and a deserted field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 innocent people lost their lives that day. Another 9,000 have died in the years since, while tens of thousands of others contend with mental and physical health issues linked to the attacks.The immediate and long-term impacts of that event have indelibly shaped the United States of today – its policies and politics; its economic and geopolitical relations; even daily life and interactions in communities, schools, and workplaces.Some who lost family and friends have come to realize the reassurance that President Joe Biden held out in September 2021, that one day “the memory of your beloved brings a smile to your lips, even while still bringing a tear to your eye.”Others who survived the attacks “took a hard look at themselves and radically changed their lives after 9/11” as The Washington Post’s Optimist feature observed this week. It described a group of friends who made it out of the World Trade Center that day leaving their careers in finance for lives of public service – to work in local government, at literacy nonprofits, and for the Red Cross.For a few – such as the Monitor’s Mideast correspondent Taylor Luck – the event sparked an intense interest in the region to, as he tells it, “understand, to hear people tell their own stories, to listen to different views, to challenge my assumptions.”And for many thousands, the event was a rallying call to patriotism, to protect American ideals of freedom and democracy. They volunteered for the military, serving tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those battles abroad have been mirrored in increasingly bitter political and cultural disputes at home, with an increase in religion- and race-based rhetoric and violence.In the view of one American, who was 10 when his father died on 9/11, it might be time to assert a patriotism “born not of military might or political rhetoric, but of radical, neighborly empathy.” In The New York Times this week, Charlie Greene recalled the “unprompted pride of being an American” that he felt when neighbors spontaneously formed a candlelight vigil outside his family’s home, showing up “to create and carry light.”Today, as a father – now able to smile at the memory of his own dad – Mr. Greene urges recommitting to “the steady, everyday work of citizenship – greeting our neighbors, bridging our divides and choosing unity before tragedy forces our hand.”“The heroes of that day showed us how to respond in our darkest hour,” as he notes. “Our task now is to prove that ... we remember how to live together in the light.”