I woke up this morning the way I usually do. Coffee. The ordinary noise of a house coming online. Alexa gave me the daily briefing like she does most days — weather, a little news, the calendar’s mild suggestions about what kind of human being I am supposed to be today.
Then she told me it was September 11.
Not as a wound. Not as a massacre. As a celebration of community support. Gathering. Involvement. The soft words institutions use when they want you to feel warm without feeling anything true.
There was nothing — nothing — about the tragedy. Nothing about the destruction. Nothing about the lives taken. No planes. No towers. No Pentagon. No field in Pennsylvania. No murder. Just community, as if the main fact of the day were that people were nice to each other afterward.
I am not against community. Firefighters ran toward fire. Neighbors opened doors. Churches filled. Blood banks had lines. Ordinary Americans held each other up because the alternative was to fall down alone. That happened, and it mattered, and anyone who lived through those weeks remembers the strange tenderness in public places.
And for once in my long memory — through Vietnam, through all the years since — it truly brought the country together. It did not matter if you were conservative or liberal. It did not matter if you were Republican, Independent, or Democrat. None of that mattered. For a short while, we were one. It brought us together as both a people and a country.
But if that is the headline twenty-five years later — if the machine in your kitchen reduces September 11 to a civic pep talk — then something has gone wrong with our memory.
This is not an anniversary party. It is a marking. Twenty-five years since a vicious attack on civilians. Twenty-five years since people went to work and were killed for being in America, for being in those buildings, for being on those planes. Twenty-five years since first responders climbed into a vertical grave. Twenty-five years since passengers decided, with the time they had left, that they would not go quietly.
Say that first. Or do not pretend you are remembering.
I am Eastern Orthodox. I know the difference between a feast and a memorial. One is for joy that has a right to be loud. The other is for love that has to stand still in front of death and tell the truth. September 11 is not a feast of involvement. It is a memorial of slaughter and courage. If your briefing cannot bear the second sentence, it has no business smiling through the first.
We live in a culture that is very good at sanding the edges off hard days. Tragedy becomes “healing.” Evil becomes “conflict.” Murder becomes “an event.” The dead become a backdrop for lessons about teamwork. Some of that impulse is merciful. People cannot live forever at the temperature of that morning. But mercy is not the same thing as erasure, and a generation that inherits only the soft version will not know what was taken from them.
I work around young people who did not see those pictures live. For them, September 11 can arrive the way Alexa delivered it to me: as a theme. Community. Resilience. National togetherness. All real. All secondary. The primary fact is that human beings planned the killing of innocents and carried it out in daylight, on camera, with theology in their mouths and civilians in their sights.
At school today it was marked as Patriot Day — polite, PC, watered down — announced over the PA while students and staff were still walking to class. Nobody really stopped. Nobody really cared. Soft enough to pass through a hallway without interrupting the morning.
If we cannot say that without flinching, we are not sober. We are managed.
I spent twenty years in the Navy. I do not romanticize war or grief. I do know this: a country that cannot speak plainly about an attack on its people will eventually struggle to speak plainly about anything that costs it. Soft language is not always kindness. Sometimes it is just how a culture avoids the bill.
So here is my small insistence on this marking of twenty-five years.
Acknowledge the attack.
Name it as vicious.
Remember the lives taken before you congratulate yourselves on the gatherings that followed.
Hold the community stories — they are true — but put them in the right order, after the bodies, after the courage that ran toward the smoke, after the passengers who fought.
Alexa can keep the weather. She can keep the traffic. She can keep her cheerful calendar voice for birthdays and bake sales.
She does not get to turn September 11 into a celebration of vibes.
The dead were not a community exercise. They were people. The day was not a workshop in involvement. It was blood, steel, ash, and a wound that still belongs to us whether our devices are comfortable saying so or not.
Mark it solemnly. Or do not pretend you marked it at all.
Never forget. The bodies matter. Memory is the least we owe.
— Padraig Riley