Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, 2001, the phrase “never forget” still lands with force. But as a librarian, I think the more useful question is: what exactly are we promising not to forget?
We can remember the date and still miss the lesson. We can remember the politics and still lose sight of the people. And we can remember the fear while forgetting the Constitution is designed for moments like that, when pressure pushes a society toward shortcuts.
At the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City, visitors see a line from Virgil, forged into recovered World Trade Center steel: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” It is a fitting starting point, because the anniversary is first about nearly 3,000 lives, not talking points.
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People first
Political science professor Luwei Ying offers a simple but grounding recommendation for how to observe this anniversary: center the human stories. That means reading accounts from victims’ families, survivors, first responders, service members, and the communities that carried the weight of what followed.
That approach does something important for constitutional thinking. It reminds us that citizenship is not just a legal status. It is a practice. A shared commitment to treat neighbors as fellow Americans, even when we disagree, even when we are scared, and even when leaders ask for extraordinary power.
If you are looking for a starting point that is factual and comprehensive, Ying points to the 9/11 Commission Report, which documents how the attacks happened and highlights institutional failures that made the country more vulnerable.
A generation removed
Twenty-five years is long enough for a civic problem to emerge quietly: many adults now know 9/11 only as history. Ying encourages younger people to talk with those who remember the day firsthand, not as a nostalgia exercise, but as a way to learn how panic, grief, and uncertainty can reshape public life.
Constitutional government depends on that kind of memory transfer. The Bill of Rights makes more sense when you understand why a frightened public is tempted to trade liberty for a feeling of control, and how hard it is to rebuild trust after rights are narrowed.
What we learned about terrorism
Ying describes 9/11 as both an immense human tragedy and a turning point in American foreign and domestic policy. Terrorism did not begin in 2001, but after 9/11 it became a defining political and security concern in the United States and globally. It also accelerated research that helped the public and policymakers understand terrorist violence more clearly.
One of the most practical insights for ordinary citizens is this: there is no reliable “terrorist profile.” You cannot accurately predict who will commit an act of political violence based on appearance, background, or stereotype. That matters for unity because profiling is one of the fastest ways to widen social divides and weaken trust in government.
Another key point is that terrorist organizations tend to be strategic and adaptive. They adjust their tactics, recruitment, and propaganda in response to pressure and changing political conditions. That means “security” is not a single law or a single operation. It is an ongoing set of choices, and those choices have constitutional consequences.
Ying also emphasizes something the American public sometimes forgets: worldwide, terrorism has often been concentrated in conflict-affected countries, intertwined with civil wars and insurgencies. And “Muslim civilians have constituted a very large share of the victims of violence committed by jihadist organizations.” That fact alone should caution us against treating entire communities as suspect.
Security and liberty
After 9/11, the federal government built out a far more robust counterterrorism system. Ying draws an important distinction between the phrase “Global War on Terror,” which different administrations have used in different ways, and the broader architecture that developed afterward: intelligence coordination, law enforcement capacity, homeland security efforts, and international partnerships.
That system helped weaken groups like al-Qaida. But Ying is equally clear about the costs of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: profound loss of life, displacement, massive public spending, long-term health impacts for veterans, and fierce debates about civil liberties and the limits of military power.
From a constitutional perspective, the lesson is not “never defend the country.” It is “defend the country in a way that stays worthy of it.” The Constitution does not require naivety. It requires restraint, process, and accountability, especially when power expands quickly.
Unity without scapegoating
Here is the hardest civic truth I know how to put plainly: terrorists aim for effects beyond the immediate violence. They want fear and rage to ricochet through a society until we do their work for them, by turning on one another or by accepting measures that hollow out democratic life.
Ying puts it in terms of strategy. The 9/11 attack was meant not only to kill, but to provoke a larger reaction from the United States and to deepen divisions between the Western world and Muslim communities. Extremist groups benefit when whole populations are treated as enemies because alienation can make recruitment stories more believable.
So one of the most practical acts of unity is also one of the most morally basic: refuse collective blame. Ying states the principle directly: “We should hold perpetrators responsible for what they do while refusing to judge millions of other people on the basis of their religion, ethnicity, nationality or origin.”
That is not softheartedness. It is democratic resilience. And it aligns with the Constitution’s equal protection commitments and with the American ideal that rights attach to persons, not to favored categories.
What still holds
Anniversaries can trap us in ceremony. But 25 years after 9/11, there are still things Americans do well, and they are worth naming because they are choices we can keep making.
- We remember by telling real stories. Not just the geopolitics, but the lives that were interrupted and the people who ran toward danger.
- We can be unified without being uniform. Unity is not forced agreement. It is the decision to treat one another as fellow citizens, entitled to dignity and due process.
- We keep arguing about limits. That can feel exhausting, but it is also a sign of constitutional health. Democracies are supposed to debate where power should stop.
- We are capable of learning. Terrorism is not a problem with a simple endpoint, but government can make it rarer and less effective, and citizens can insist that security measures do not become an all-purpose justification for overreach.
The next 25 years
When people ask whether the world can ever be completely free of terrorism, Ying answers in a way that is sober and useful: as long as political conflict exists, some actors may resort to terrorism. But governments can reduce its frequency and effectiveness, and they often do so in ways the public never notices.
The part that belongs to all of us is how we react. The Constitution is not a fair-weather document. It is meant to function when we are shaken. If we want “never forget” to mean something practical, it can be this:
- Remember the people.
- Learn the history and the institutional failures, not just the headlines.
- Reject collective hatred, because it is both wrong and strategically self-defeating.
- Insist that security and democracy reinforce one another.
Citizenship, at its best, is the ongoing choice to protect one another without surrendering what makes the country worth protecting in the first place.