Daily Herald opinion: Terror at 25: A time to evaluate not just what happened on 9/11, but where we are headed today

On every anniversary of a terrible event, it is natural, indeed important, to spend some time in reflection. To remember, yes; and also to consider how our collective memory has adapted over the course of another year’s passage. But certain anniversaries arrive with added impact. They call not only for honoring lives lost or sacrifices made on a certain date but also for considering how we as a people have adjusted over the long haul to a new world order.

The marker of 25 years, a quarter of century, is such a case. It applies today to the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, and it can’t help but put us in mind of the world we have made over that span of time.

For weeks, months and even years following that tragic day, we talked often about “the new normal,” and we wondered what that was becoming. For our world. For our nation. For our own communities and even our own families. We knew everything was somehow different on September 2, 2011, than it had been a day before, but we weren’t quite sure in what way.

Now, we know. And, let’s be honest, it is far from the picture we were imagining in those early times. After all, in those profound days of skies emptied of airplanes, somber gatherings in the town square and phone calls to check on family and friends, we were overwhelmed by a palpable sense of unity. Republicans and Democrats and people of no particular political interest acknowledged our common larger interests. Religious groups talked of the power of interfaith communion. There seemed a near universal awareness of and aversion to the ugly power of hate.

Surely, we thought, we had crested some difficult evolutionary hill along the road to a more positive social order.

Could we have been more wrong?

Our politics today are more divided and stained with animus than most of us can ever remember. In many halls of power as well as not-so-private human hearts, the idea of religious tolerance has been equated to some form of spiritual cowardice. Whether applied to groups or the behaviors of individuals, hate too often is not just tolerated but welcomed.

So, when we talk about how we have adjusted as a people over the long haul since September 11, 2001, it may be well to remember not just the horrors of that day, but the hopes we harbored in its aftermath.

For most of our children, the terror events are as ancient and impersonal as any other of the critical dates they are told to commit to memory in history class. They are pictures of smoke billowing from buildings and wistful social media posts telling them to remember and honor the fallen and the heroes that we who lived through it will never forget. The tenor of our time certainly would suggest that we impress upon them more about the unity that defined us in those first hours and the hopes that seemed so profound and promising.

As we have done on this anniversary in the past, we encourage you to join a memorial in your community today as you may have done that quarter of a century ago. We urge you to take a moment to reflect on those horrible pictures, to remember the eerily silent skies over O'Hare that followed and those phone calls to family and friends and to honor those who lost their lives and those who risked theirs to save others.

But we also hope you will take some time to reflect on the present in the context of all that happened then and has happened since. And perhaps in honoring the commitments that accompanied our shared suffering, we can resist some of the harsh temptations of the present and recommit to a better “new normal” in the future.