America marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11
By Elena Rossi · Reporting from Rome ·
There is a particular kind of cruelty in the way a nation treats its own ghosts. On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the United States did not gather as a country, but as a collection of warring factions performing a synchronized liturgy of grief. As I watch from this distance, I see a superpower that has mistaken the adrenaline of trauma for the glue of citizenship. The tragedy of 2001 was an external blow; the tragedy of 2026 is that the U.S. has spent a quarter-century using that wound to justify a slow, institutional suicide.
The Liturgy of the Divided
The geography of the commemorations told the whole story. As reported by NPR, the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan became a crowded stage for the old guard—Vice President Vance standing alongside former Presidents Biden, Bush, Clinton, and Obama—while President Trump held a separate court at the Pentagon. In the air, the rhetoric shifted from mourning to mobilization. President Trump spoke of a "sacred oath" and declared, "That's why we fight today."
The most capable advocate for this posture would argue that strength is the only honest tribute to the fallen—that a nation which forgets how to fight is a nation that invites the next catastrophe. They would say that the "sacred oath" is not a political slogan, but a survival mechanism. But this is a fallacy of the bunker. True strength resides in the institutions that hold a people together when the bombs stop falling, not in the rhetoric that keeps them in a state of permanent mobilization.
We have seen this mechanism before. The Assassination of JFK taught us that a sudden, violent shock to the national psyche creates a permanent shift in collective memory and a lasting sense of lost innocence. In 1963, that shift eventually curdled into a profound distrust of the state. In 2001, the shock was larger, but the result was the same: a permanent loss of innocence that the U.S. attempted to cure with the Iraq War. Instead of healing the psyche, they exported the trauma.
The Toxicity of the State
If the political theater was a performance of unity, the archives were a confession of betrayal. New York City officials recently unveiled a repository of air quality documents that had been withheld for twenty-five years. As Jon Stewart noted with his characteristic, biting irony, the state simply "buried" the information that the air in downtown Manhattan was toxic.
This is where the institutional failure becomes visceral. Texas Public Radio | TPR highlighted the story of Lila Nordstrom, who watched the towers fall from her classroom at Stuyvesant High School and later founded StuyHealth to fight for the peers who were left behind, coughing up the debris of their own city. When a state protects its secrets more fiercely than its children, the social contract is not just breached; it is incinerated.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum may open exhibitions like "In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11-Inspired Service," but no amount of curated courage can mask the smell of toxic dust. This is the "disjointedness" that Rev. Eric Olsen, a retired chaplain, lamented to NPR. He spoke of the sadness of death notifications and a country more un-unified than any he has seen in his lifetime. The state’s failure to be honest about the air quality is a mirror of its failure to be honest about the cost of its ambitions.
The Eternal Return to the Bomb
The numbers provided by the Brown University study are the true ledger of this era: 2,977 died in the initial attacks, but another 7,000 U.S. service members died in the subsequent wars. We saw the machinery of this cycle during the Saddam Hussein trial, where the legal process attempted to tidy up the wreckage of a botched intervention. We saw it again in the eventual outcome of the Arab Spring, where the ghost of U.S. intervention continued to haunt the stability of the region.
And yet, as Rev. Olsen noted, "now we're back in the Middle East bombing again." The U.S. is trapped in a loop where the memory of 9/11 is used as a perpetual license for violence. Former Governor George Pataki correctly identified the "biggest disappointment" as the polarization that replaced the unity of September 12. But polarization is not an accident; it is the natural result of a culture that prioritizes the "fight" over the "common ground."
The U.S. is currently spending down its institutional capital to buy a few more years of ideological purity. By treating the 25th anniversary as a springboard for current military action rather than a moment of civic reckoning, the leadership is ensuring that the "sacred oath" remains a weapon rather than a bond.
The United States has spent twenty-five years treating 9/11 as a beginning—a beginning of a war, a beginning of a security state, a beginning of a partisan divide. It is time they treated it as a lesson. Until the state prioritizes the health of the survivor over the secrecy of the administration, and the peace of the piazza over the noise of the Pentagon, it will remain a nation of ghosts, haunting its own ruins.