9/11 at 25: Never Forget, and What We Are Forgetting

Long before 9/11, America had buried herself beneath ashes and twisted steel girders—not physical ones but moral and spiritual ones. She had welcomed being buried alive by Woke and Leftist ideologies that do to the soul and mind what the collapse of the Twin Towers did to human bodies.

But for one shining moment, America believed that this barbaric tragedy brought its citizens back to their senses. Not only would they never forget the tragedy of that day in September 2001, they also would not surrender the never-ending battle that men must wage against evil. 

More vital, they would remember that there is evil, that there is falsehood—finally leaving behind us the voices which called these metaphysical verities into question. On that day 25 years ago, we thought we had turned a corner. America had been taught a lesson sketched in the bold lines of carnage, unspeakable suffering, and wrenching loss.

It was shouted from America’s highest peaks—Never Forget.

Etched in the imagination of common Americans and even the uncommon intelligentsia—Never Forget.

Like an incessant drumbeat—Never Forget.

Then, America forgot.

And that once mighty phrase slowly became quaint, brittle, stale. 

America had moved on, as they say. Actually, it had moved backward, and the grim realities of 9/11 faded from memory like a pair of old shoes.

In the electrified feelings of that tragic 9/11 moment, men forgot the tragic nature of man. He forgets, even lessons of uncommon urgency. For man is hostage to the effects of Original Sin, and those effects make him more comfortable with worlds of his own making than the world which God has made. His intellect is dulled, and his feelings are tyrannized. Passions are repelled by unhappy outcomes or difficult tasks, leaving man adrift in forgetfulness, tragic forgetfulness.

Long before 9/11, America had convinced herself that truth was a straitjacket and that only a triumphant self-autonomy would make her truly free. For 2,000 years of Christian-rooted Western Civilization, there reigned a hegemony of truth, beauty, and goodness. With its demise, there rapidly followed the crumbling of the old canons of justice, the perfection of the intellect, love of beauty, reverence for hard work and self-reliance, pursuit of virtue, and the unchanging steadiness of religion.

For one shining moment, America thought that a return to this cultural sanity was afoot. We beheld selflessness not self-absorption. We heard truth spoken, not ambiguities. Even words like evil stood on the lips of men who theretofore thought it as relevant as a Grimm fairy tale. We saw hard-bitten firemen discovering corpses, then making the Sign of the Cross. 

Americans marveled at these New Things and thought they would endure. Good Americans believed that their countrymen had rediscovered a grand new horizon, and so they shouted, “Never Forget.” 

But then men did what they always do: they forgot. And soon that Tuesday, September 11, 2001, seemed only a mirage.

Our present circumstance of forgetfulness is grim.

Only two states in the Union insist that 9/11 be taught to its students in all its tragedy and heartbreak. Where are the schools in the other 48? They teach 9/11, but it is a sanitized 9/11—a 9/11 with no villains, no raw “moral” judgments, no “Westernized” moral assumptions. Education should mean the inculcation of truth and the training of minds to know, discover, and speak the truth. Education builds the backbone of the human person by boldly setting forth truth and rallying against falsehood. That is called character. And character possesses a certain majesty. So it is that Chesterton defined education as “teaching the youngest children the oldest things.”

C.S. Lewis explores the consequences of erasing eternal truths from man’s conscience—and how doing so mummifies the human person—in his essay “Modern Man and His Categories of Thought”:

I wonder whether we shall not have to reconvert men to real Paganism as a preliminary to converting them to Christianity. If they were Stoics, Orphics, Mithraists, or (better still) peasants worshipping the earth, our task might be easier.

Of course, the backbone of all education is religion. If God is not hovering over every educational venture, education becomes vaporous.

Americans saw the power of religion when they watched those Heroic Firemen of the Sign of the Cross. As they accomplished their grisly work, they did not forget the central place of God and Holy Religion. But what if religion becomes as porous and vapid as the culture about it? What if religion adopts the nonchalance of a yard sale?

What if religion attempts, with all its might, to fit in with the culture because it thinks so little of itself? What if religion bows to whatever trends the culture finds appealing? In that case, religion is no longer the thick wall behind which men stand as they face the enemy. What if religion begins to teach that there are simply no enemies, either moral or physical ones? The culture is cut off at its knees. It is left to its own devices, and those devices always serve the Enemy of man.

At the time of the 9/11 horror, certain political figures attempted to avoid a backlash against Muslims by intoning the bromide that Islam is a religion of peace. At the time, few swallowed this sentimental palliative because Islam had indeed demonstrated that peace was not its aim. In fact, Islam simply means “submission,” and its 1,500-year history demonstrated that. 

Yet part of America’s forgetfulness today is a deliberate denial of Islam’s true nature. When any American attempts to speak the truth about Islam, they are labeled Islamophobic. Many in the public square engage in a kind of gaslighting. They happily entertain the once censured view that impassioned Muslims are quite fit to serve in public office even when they display an open hatred for the nation. Several fevered Islamists are running for public office this year, some even openly flirting with the question of Sharia—Islamic law. The mayor of New York City has as his top legal counsel Ramzi Kassem, a gentleman who once defended Islamic terrorists.

This, in the epicenter of 9/11 terrorism. Never Forget?

Such is the inevitable result of a culture that has long abandoned the impregnable nature of truth. Again, Chesterton: “A culture which tolerates anything, is a culture which believes in nothing.”

In a happier time, religion would have been a shield against this slide into nihilism. But what occurs when religion tries desperately to shed its Old Certainties so as to receive the approving strokes of a dying culture? It becomes a willing accomplice in the collapse of civilization. How often did ancient Israel meet with the blazing wrath of God because it flirted with the false gods of the peoples surrounding it?

Of course, when religion defects from its solemn obligations to uphold the truth, it becomes the welcoming party to the hordes that will destroy them.

Pope Leo the Great met Attila in order to halt his entrance into Rome for purposes of pillage. What if men of religion meet the Atillas of our day only to surrender to them our patrimony? Even more revolting, they meet today’s Attilas with the treacly creed that every approach to life is equally good.

Yes, many of us remember well the full-throated anthem of 25 years ago: Never Forget.

But we must always remember that man always forgets—especially when those anointed to remember censure remembering itself.