Lori Falce: Look back to lessons of Sept. 10, 2001

Sept. 11, 2001, was not just a day.

It wasn’t a simple Tuesday. Kids went to school and people went to work and the day still started with alarm clocks and cereal and morning commutes, but the differences between that day and what came after were apparent as people took their first coffee break. Sept. 11 was the day things changed.

That before and after break tends to draw more attention to the second chapter. We talk a lot about what is different today. The towers that fell. The memorials that rose. The way four airplanes and a terrorist attack that spread over three states has rippled forward in time for 20 years and is likely to continue to be felt for decades.

But what about the day before? Are there things we should be taking with us from Sept. 10? Things we could learn about ourselves or our world by remembering what happened when the Twin Towers still dominated the New York skyline and Shanksville was a name few people knew?

Perhaps it is that despite the fault line that cracked across our collective history when American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston drove like an enormous bullet into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, less has changed than we would believe.

In fact, all too much is the same.

In 2001, there was grumbling about the election, about what should have happened and what did and what was fair and claims of “not my president” in the aftermath of the contested ballots of 2000 and George W. Bush’s down-to-the-wire win. They would continue throughout his presidency.

In 2001, there was a scandal involving Andrew Cuomo, who had been secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton administration. On Sept. 10, there was testimony before the House of Representatives about HUD’s poor management that led to fraud and abuse while hurting the people it was supposed to help. Twenty years later, new scandal over sexual harassment has prompted Cuomo to resign as New York’s governor.

In 2001, Afghanistan was embroiled in civil war with the combined religious, military and political power of the Taliban holding the most control. While not responsible for the 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan became the site of America’s longest-fought war because Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida took refuge there. In 2021, U.S. troops have just vacated the country and the Taliban has swept over it once again.

Is it possible that 2,996 people were killed in the attacks, setting in motion two decades of a War on Terror that saw more dead and more injured, only to end up with all the same problems? Have so many rescue workers who committed themselves to digging through the poisonous wreckage sickened and died in the years since for nothing to change?

Tragedy is frequently a rallying cry to do better and reach higher, and that was definitely the goal after the planes crashed. But sometimes it seems that once the rubble was carted away and the beautiful and moving memorials were placed, we forgot somehow that fixing what went wrong was not just about cleaning up.

It should have been about not just recovering from the attacks, but about being more than we were the day before. We need to hold leaders to account and pursue and promote peace whenever possible. We need to prioritize justice, including honoring spoken and unspoken promises to those first responders whose health problems continue to add to the 9/11 body count.

And we need to just be people who will find common ground and work together rather than seeing everyone with a different opinion as the enemy.