The 25th anniversary of 9/11, September 11

The United States marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on Friday, September 11, with ceremonies across the country, from candlelit vigils at fire stations to a baseball game between the Yankees and Mets. But the commemoration exposed fractures in American life that have widened since the attacks briefly unified the nation. On a blue-sky morning 25 years ago, terrorists affiliated with al-Qaida hijacked four commercial airliners. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. A third slammed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. A fourth crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers disrupted the attackers' plan to use the plane in an assault on Washington, D.C. Historians say at least 2,977 people died in the initial attack, according to NPR reporting. A study by Brown University found that an additional 7,000 U.S. service members died in post-9/11 wars. Tens of thousands more fell ill and many died from illnesses linked to toxic debris that spread after the planes crashed. Fire department vigils were held throughout the city. A special Yankees-Mets game included tributes to first responders and those lost. A memorial service was held at the crash site in rural Pennsylvania. A new exhibition at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, titled "In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11-Inspired Service," recognizes people who committed their lives to public service after experiencing the trauma of 9/11 and its aftermath. Museum director Elizabeth Hillman, a historian and U.S. Air Force veteran, said "That we can come together with compassion, with courage to serve after suffering an incredible set of losses, on 9/11 and after, is a really powerful message." She noted that 9/11 "changed the [nation's] foreign policy, the shape of the armed forces and the ways we understood what a threat was and what constitutes being safe." Vice President Vance told a press conference last week that he encourages every American, especially younger generations who do not remember the day, to "tune in for a couple of hours and see what it meant." He added, "I think that sense of commonality and common purpose that we all had on 9/11, that's something we really try every single day to get back to." But the anniversary also brought into focus what has fractured in the 25 years since September 12, when the sense of national unity felt strongest. On Tuesday, New York City officials unveiled a repository of air quality documents linked to 9/11 that had been withheld from the public by past administrations. Jon Stewart, the comedian who has emerged as an activist supporting 9/11 survivors, voiced anger over the disclosure. "They didn't recognize that the air everybody was breathing in downtown Manhattan was toxic until October of 2001," Stewart said. "So to be fair to them, they only buried that information for 25 years." Former New York Governor George Pataki, who was in office when the attacks occurred, told NPR he is proud of how New York City recovered from the disaster. But he voiced concern about divisions in American society that he believes grew after 9/11. "We are just in so many ways unable to work politically toward finding common ground," Pataki said. "The biggest disappointment to me since Sept. 11 is that polarization. It's the opposite of the sense of unity—that we were all Americans—that we felt on Sept. 12." Rev. Eric Olsen, a former National Guard chaplain who was working in upstate New York when the attacks began and served for months on a security detail around ground zero, expressed similar alarm about the nation's trajectory in the decades since. Olsen, now 68 and retired, served a harrowing tour in Iraq and spent more than a decade of active Guard service counseling military personnel caught in ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "I don't like the way it's gone," Olsen said. "I love this country, but we're more disjointed and un-unified than we've ever been in my lifetime. Everybody's afraid of everything. And now we're back in the Middle East bombing again." He said he did "a lot of death notifications for families who lost sons and daughters. It was just a very sad time." On the eve of Friday's commemoration, political and cultural divisions surfaced when two prominent Republicans who led New York on 9/11, Pataki and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, suggested in interviews that the city's current Democratic leader, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim, should stay away from memorial ceremonies, according to NPR reporting. Olsen said he intends to "take some time to myself to pray, contemplate and grieve" on the 25th anniversary.