Twenty-five years ago, we made a promise. It was only two words long: Never forget.
We painted it on overpasses and firehouse doors. We printed it on bumper stickers and tattooed it on our arms. It was the simplest promise a nation could make, and on September 12, 2001, there was not an American alive who doubted we would keep it.
We didn’t. It took less than twenty years for that promise to fail, and this week we got the receipt.
The Buckley Institute’s annual survey of 803 American undergraduates found that 22 percent of college students agree that “America deserved Sept. 11.” Another 6 percent aren’t sure. More than one in five of the young adults we are preparing to lead this country believe the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people was something we had coming. They are in good company with streamers like Hasan Piker. He said the same thing in 2019, and he now tells millions of young followers that the U.S. military has committed more terrorism than al Qaeda.
It is tempting to blame the students. I don’t. Not one of them was alive when the towers fell. They never watched the second plane hit in real time, never saw the ash-covered crowds streaming out of Lower Manhattan, never waited beside a phone that would never ring. Everything they know about September 11, they learned from us. Or didn’t.
These students were sitting in elementary and middle school classrooms in the years before the 20th anniversary. That was the window when the promise should have been kept. September 11 should have been taught with the same seriousness we give Pearl Harbor: who attacked us, what they believed, why they hated us, who died, who ran toward the danger, and what it cost the nation afterward. Instead, in far too many schools, the day got a moment of silence and a worksheet, and then the class moved on.
When you don’t teach history, you don’t get a blank slate. You get whoever fills it. Today the people filling it are influencers with a microphone, an algorithm, and no obligation to the truth.
The same survey shows what happens when history goes untaught. Forty-two percent of students said they would rather live under socialism than capitalism, the widest margin in the five years the question has been asked. Nearly half said Cuba and the Soviet Union offer a better economic model than the United States. A generation that was never taught what happened to those who suffered under those systems, or what happened on that Tuesday morning in September, cannot be expected to understand either.
Here is what makes this moment so urgent. We are one generation away from losing the people who were there.
For a quarter century, 9/11 education has quietly depended on eyewitnesses. A survivor visiting a classroom. A retired firefighter speaking at an assembly. A widow telling students about the voicemail she still keeps. The firefighters who dug through the pile are retiring, and too many are dying from the cancers they carried home from Ground Zero. The survivors who walked down seventy flights of stairs are in their sixties and seventies. The parents who lost children that morning are growing old. When those voices are gone, the history of that day will be written by people who weren’t there. Some of them have already decided we deserved it.
There is an old saying that each of us dies twice. The first time is when we stop breathing and our spirit leaves this world. The second time is when people stop speaking our name and stop remembering. The nearly 3,000 men, women, and children killed on September 11 have already suffered the first death. So have the thousands of first responders and service members who have died since because of that day. Whether they suffer the second is entirely up to us.
Think of Todd Beamer and the passengers of Flight 93. They rushed the cockpit so that a plane bound for Washington would end in a Pennsylvania field instead. Think of the 343 firefighters who climbed toward the fire. If a fifth of our college students believe America deserved that day, those heroes are already beginning to die that second death.
“Never forget” was never meant to be a slogan. It was a job. And it is a job we can still do.
It starts with treating 9/11 as core American history, not an anniversary observance. Every state should require that it be taught, with real instructional time. Teachers should get the materials and training to teach it honestly, including the ideology of the men who carried it out. It means recording the testimony of survivors, responders, and families now, while they can still tell it, and putting those stories in front of students. It means bringing students to the memorials and bringing the memorials to students who can’t make the trip. And it means having the courage to say plainly, in every classroom, that no one deserved to die on September 11.
We made a two-word promise, and we broke it faster than any of us thought possible. The good news is that promises can be renewed. The generation that was there still has time to teach the generation that wasn’t, but not much.
Never forget. This time, let’s mean it.
