9/11 and the Struggle for National Memory

We now commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the worst attack on American soil and the last moment when America came together across partisan lines and other divides. In 2006, construction started on the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower, which opened in 2014, as well as on the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, which opened in 2011 and 2014, respectively. A separate memorial was built in Pennsylvania, inaugurated in 2011, at the crash site of United Flight 93, to honor the most moving act of courage that day—the “Let’s Roll” charge that showed the American fighting spirit and which saved lives and prevented more horror at the cost of the passengers’ lives, since the plane would have destroyed another building in D.C. This is most of what we have, both public and private, as memorials. It was good and necessary to rebuild as well as to remember.