A quarter-century now since that blue September morning, since the planes went into the buildings and a field east of Pittsburgh, and what have we learned? What have we learned about ourselves, and about the grand experiment that is America?
We have learned our comfortable assumptions about our comfortable American lives are a chimera, a cheap toy that jitters apart at the touch.
We have learned when that happens, some of us run toward the jackstraw ruins, and some of us do not.
We have learned that the best of us draw closer, pull each other up, stand as one. And we have learned that the worst of us use our 9/11s to divide us, to make us fear and loathe, to peddle some sinister Other because doing so is their path to power.
And so I begin, this morning of mornings, with two names.
One is Zohran Mamdani.
The other is Mohammed Shajahan.
One is the mayor of New York, and a Muslim.
The other, also a Muslim, died when the towers went down 25 years ago today -- which is why you'll find his name etched in the smooth metal that surrounds the reflecting pools where the towers once stood, and which now memorialize the almost 3,000 dead hatred and fanaticism killed that day.
Some people think Zohran Mamdani, though he is the city's mayor and a New Yorker who lost a piece of his soul on 9/11 as surely as any New Yorker, should stay away from today's remembrance in the city. They think showing up would be a slap in the face to the families of the murdered, because to some people being Muslim means you might as well have murdered them yourself.
To them, I offer the name Mohammed Shajahan. And I offer something I wrote after visiting the 9/11 memorial a decade ago -- something about Shajahan's name and all the other names, and the message they should send to every one of us.
Ten years along, I hardly needed to change a word:
We went to where it happened on a clear morning in August, the kind that brings up an ache even years after that murderous September day. It is a lush, contemplative place now, with shade trees and benches and the two reflecting pools, water spilling down the sides like silver murmuring embroidery.
Two pools; two peaceful footprints where the towers stood that day. And around them the names etched in smooth slanting steel, all those names, all those lost and blameless souls.
Pretty soon, the names are all you see.Pretty soon, the lovely twin footprints fade. So does the triumphant rise of One World Trade Center, glittering in the sun just north of the north pool. The world narrows. You look down. And you find yourself reading off the names as you walk slowly around the pools, wondering who they were, what their lives were like, how it can be that you keep walking and walking and walking and the names never seem to end.
The names are Diaz and Bachman and Vicario; White and Miller and Lee. There are Morrises and Singhs and Benvenios; Doanys and Bonnetts and Roaches. And, yes, names like this, too: Mohammed Shajahan.
Which is to say, hate is ecumenical.
Hate killed Christians and Jews and, yes, Muslims, that day. It killed whites and blacks and Asians and Hispanics. It is a lesson we need to remember this day, a home truth to which we need to hold fast especially in this ugly, riven time, when unprincipled American outliers use fear and loathing and blatant falsehoods to con the easily conned.
One of the most stubborn of those falsehoods: That we can make ourselves safe from all future 9/11s by re-making America in the image of a particularly noxious brand of Christian faith, instead of acknowledging the harder truth that those who killed so many on 9/11 were not adherents of any faith. They were simply barbarians whose only God was death.
And so making Muslims an Other because the barbarians claimed it as their faith, as the more reprehensible among us tend to do, is a fool's enterprise that only demeans America and what it stands for, making it safer only in the sense that it makes us less American. America is an idea to the barbarians, and there is only one way to kill an idea. That's by making its defenders diminish it themselves.
But 9/11 should have taught us the folly of that. It should have taught us that our enemies are enemies of all of us, not just Judeo-Christians. If that were not so, our enemies would not have killed so indiscriminately that day, would not even now be persecuting and killing Muslims as prolifically as they do anyone else.
The names, all those names upon names, are our witnesses to that.
