We Remember Where We Were on 9/11. Do We Remember Who We Were?

Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, I still think about the families searching for loved ones, the children who emptied their piggy banks, and what ordinary Americans can teach a divided country about showing up for one another.

My first trip to New York City began outside Pier 90, with families searching for people they loved.

It was in the days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and they seemed to be everywhere, moving through the confusion with handmade flyers bearing photographs of husbands, wives, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and friends. Beneath each photograph were a name and a phone number, offered in the desperate hope that someone might recognize a face or have information that could help.

The families looked exhausted and dazed. Much of the country was still trying to comprehend what had happened. I had come to New York as part of the federal response, and there was plenty of work to be done. But when a family member approached, whatever had seemed urgent a few moments earlier could wait.

You stopped. You listened.

Most of the time, there was little I could tell them. I could point them toward reliable information, steer them toward people who might help and try to guide them away from the rumors spreading through a city desperate for good news.

What I could not do was give them the answer they wanted most: that the person in the photograph had been found alive.

When there was nothing useful left to say, you simply stayed there and listened.

I had never been to New York before. Never walked through Times Square, never seen Central Park, never stood beneath the Empire State Building. My introduction to the city came through people carrying photographs of the missing, in a place where nearly everyone seemed to be looking for someone, helping someone or waiting for news.

Nearby, at Pier 92, messages of encouragement had begun arriving from across the country. Schoolchildren had made banners for the rescue workers and the people of New York.

As I walked through the pier, one banner caught my eye.

Bearden Middle School. Knoxville, Tennessee.

The school closest to my home.

Of all the schools in all the communities sending messages to New York, here was one from home, hundreds of miles away, hanging in front of me on my first trip to a city still trying to understand the magnitude of its loss.

I am a person of faith, and over the years there have been occasional moments I have come to think of as little winks from God, something familiar appearing exactly when I needed to see it.

Seeing Bearden Middle School on that banner was one of those moments.

In a city I had never visited, surrounded by grief on a scale I had never witnessed, I felt certain I was where I was supposed to be, helping the people I was supposed to be helping.

At Ground Zero, I carried a camera and documented what was happening around me. I still have the footage.

The scale of destruction was almost impossible to absorb, even standing there. But when I think back on those days now, it is not always the enormous images that return to me first.

I remember the people.

Families holding photographs. Exhausted responders. Strangers helping strangers. People finding whatever small thing they could contribute to a catastrophe too large for any one person to fix.

Back home in East Tennessee, that same instinct was taking another form. People began raising money to buy a fire engine for New York City. It became known as the Freedom Engine.

There were significant contributions to the effort, but the donations that have stayed with me were the smallest ones: children opening their piggy banks and giving nickels, dimes and quarters.

Those children could not have understood terrorism, international politics or the decisions that would follow the attacks. Many were probably too young to understand why the adults around them were frightened.

But they understood that something terrible had happened to other people, and those people needed help.

So they gave what they had.

There was something profoundly American in that response. East Tennessee and New York City did not need to share politics, accents, culture or a worldview for people in one place to recognize the suffering of people in another.

Nobody needed to settle those differences before helping.

For most of the past quarter-century, Americans have marked Sept. 11 by asking one another where we were.

Those of us old enough to remember usually answer immediately: the room, the television, the phone call, the moment we understood this was not an accident.

Twenty-five years later, I wonder whether there is another question worth asking.

Who were we when our country needed us?

That question feels especially urgent today.

Our disagreements are real and sometimes profound. We have become skilled at sorting one another into categories and too comfortable assuming that someone who sees the world differently must be a fundamentally different kind of person.

I do not romanticize the America of September 2001. The country was not suddenly perfect after the attacks, nor did Americans suddenly agree about everything. Difficult and controversial decisions followed Sept. 11, and history continues to judge them.

Nothing about the murder of nearly 3,000 people should ever be romanticized in service of nostalgia.

What is worth remembering is how people responded to other people who needed them.

Firefighters went up stairwells while thousands of people were coming down. Police officers and EMTs moved toward danger. People lined up to give blood. Construction workers brought equipment. Restaurants fed responders. Volunteers traveled to New York without knowing what they would be asked to do.

Families searched for loved ones, and strangers stopped to listen to them.

Children in Knoxville broke open piggy banks.

That capacity did not suddenly appear in Americans on Sept. 11, and I do not believe it disappeared when the flags eventually came down from front porches.

I have seen it again and again in the years since.

My own career eventually took me from emergency management into the FBI. Sept. 11 is the reason I went.

An entire generation of agents joined the FBI because of what happened that day. We watched the towers fall and decided we wanted to be part of whatever came next.

Twenty-five years later, many of us have retired or are retiring. The agents coming up behind us mostly did not live through 9/11 as adults. Some studied it in school the way I once studied Pearl Harbor.

That is not a criticism. It is simply the math of a quarter-century.

But it means something is slowly passing out of American life: the direct memory of what it felt like to watch it happen and decide, right then, to do something about it.

I have spent much of my life around emergencies, from the fire service and EMS to the FBI and crisis communications. One lesson has stayed with me through all of it.

The distinction between a big emergency and a small one usually depends on where you are standing.

If it is your mother who cannot breathe, your father having chest pain or your child in a wrecked car, there is nothing small about what is happening.

For the person waiting, two strangers arriving with a medical bag can become the most important event in the world.

Emergency work offers a perspective on our national divisions that is hard to find on television or social media.

The dispatcher does not tell us whether the caller is a Republican or a Democrat. We do not ask before walking through the door. A firefighter does not check a homeowner’s politics before entering a burning house.

When a tornado tears through a community, the neighbor arriving with a chainsaw usually does not care whose campaign sign was standing in the yard.

The person needs help.

People come.

It is easy, looking at America today, to conclude that something essential has been lost since 2001.

Perhaps some things have been.

But I do not believe our willingness to help one another is among them.

Anger is louder now. Division is more visible. Technology puts our disagreements in front of us every hour of every day.

Service is usually quieter.

Most of it happens without cameras: inside ambulances and hospital rooms, at volunteer fire stations and church fellowship halls, in neighbors’ yards after storms and on roadsides where someone has stopped because another person is in trouble.

Sometimes it happens when a child empties a piggy bank.

Many of the young firefighters, police officers, EMTs and reporters working today were not alive when the towers fell.

They inherited Sept. 11 as history.

Those of us who were there carry it as memory.

That places a responsibility on those of us who remember.

We should tell the next generation what happened plainly, without softening the horror or the human cost. But I hope we also tell them about what happened around the edges of the images preserved in the history books.

Tell them about the families carrying photographs.

Tell them about the strangers who stopped.

Tell them about the people who gave blood, cooked meals, searched through rubble and drove across the country because they thought they might be useful.

Tell them about children in East Tennessee who saw firefighters suffering in a city they might never visit and broke open their piggy banks to help buy them a fire engine.

Tell them about a banner from a middle school in Knoxville that somehow traveled to a pier in Manhattan and reminded one frightened, overwhelmed Tennessean on his first trip to New York that home was not as far away as it seemed.

The lesson of Sept. 11 is not that Americans must agree with one another before we can care about one another.

We never have.

Perhaps the more enduring lesson is that our differences do not have to disappear for us to recognize when someone needs help.

There are people like that in every county in this country.

The volunteer who answers the pager at 2 in the morning.

The neighbor who shows up with a generator before you have even called.

The teenager who signs up for the fire department because his father did.

The child, somewhere right now, quietly emptying a piggy bank for a stranger she will never meet.

They do not make the news. They are not trying to.

They are simply the reason a divided country still manages, again and again, to show up for itself.

That is what I want the next generation to understand about Sept. 11 and about the 25 years since.

The people who ran toward danger that day did not disappear afterward.

They are still here.

They are still running.

And so are the rest of us, whenever we choose to answer the call.