September 11 isn’t supposed to be a normal day on the calendar.
Not in America.
And certainly not in New York.
Nearly 3,000 people were murdered that morning. Husbands went to work and never came home. Wives boarded airplanes they never got off. Children went to school and spent the rest of their lives missing a parent.
Twenty-five years later, September 11 still isn’t history to those families.
It’s personal.
And there was a time when presidents understood the particular weight of this day.
George W. Bush certainly did. Whatever else anyone thought of his presidency, September 11 was never just another square on his calendar. He understood what had happened, who had done it and why.
Donald Trump understands that too.
In between, something changed.
Barack Obama increasingly spoke about September 11 and Islamist terrorism through the lens of America’s treatment of Muslims. His administration seemed far more comfortable warning Americans about Islamophobia than it was confronting the ideology that had actually produced the attacks.
And that wasn’t occurring in a vacuum. During the Obama years, America’s political conversation about immigration, refugees, Islam and assimilation changed dramatically. Michigan and Minnesota changed with it.
I thought much of Obama’s Iran policy worked against American interests too. Different issue, same instinct: extraordinary concern about offending the people America needed to confront, considerably less concern about the Americans asking why.
Twenty-five years later, look where that political evolution has taken us.
New York.
The city where it happened.
A city whose skyline still bears the scar.
And now the Democrat governor of New York and the Democratic mayor of New York City are being asked by retired Port Authority police officers to stay away from Ground Zero on September 11.
How in God’s name did we get here?
John McDevitt, president of the Port Authority Retired Police Association, has asked New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul not to attend the 25th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero.
Read that again.
Retired police officers are asking the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City to stay away from the September 11 memorial.
Thirty-seven Port Authority police officers died that morning. Forty-seven members of the Port Authority family were lost altogether.
McDevitt isn’t asking for another political fight. He’s asking for the opposite.
In letters to Hochul and Mamdani, he asked them to let the families, survivors and first responders remember without turning the day into another political spectacle.
“Please allow us to remember in peace.”
That’s the request.
And I can’t get past the fact that somebody had to make it.
Hochul managed to infuriate some in the 9/11 community when One World Trade Center was illuminated for Muslim American Heritage Month.
The objection wasn’t to Muslim Americans having a heritage month.
It was the building.
Of all the buildings in all of New York.
Ground Zero.
The place where Islamist terrorists murdered thousands of Americans.
You really couldn’t find another one?
Apparently even asking that question is enough to get you accused of Islamophobia.
Hochul isn’t backing down. Her office says she’ll proudly stand alongside 9/11 families at the anniversary ceremony.
But some of those families are asking her not to.
Maybe listen to them.
Then there’s Mamdani.
A petition opposing his attendance at the ceremony has reportedly attracted more than 95,000 signatures. It was launched by Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace was killed on September 11.
Think about that.
A man who lost his wife that morning is asking the mayor of New York City not to come.
Mamdani says he’s coming anyway.
And that’s what feels so different now.
There was a time when the politics stopped at Ground Zero.
The site wasn’t supposed to belong to Republicans or Democrats. It belonged to the dead, their families, the cops, the firefighters, the construction workers, the people who ran toward those buildings while everybody else was running away.
Some things were bigger than politics.
Or at least they used to be.
Twenty-five years is apparently enough time to forget.
We’ve spent the years since September 11 becoming increasingly uncomfortable with saying plainly what happened that morning.
It wasn’t a tragedy in the abstract.
It wasn’t a collection of airplane crashes.
It wasn’t the consequence of some terrible misunderstanding between cultures.
Nineteen Islamist terrorists hijacked four airplanes and used them as weapons to murder Americans.
That’s what happened.
We knew it on September 12.
We didn’t need a seminar to understand it. We didn’t need a sensitivity consultant. We didn’t need somebody from academia explaining that acknowledging the ideology motivating the murderers might hurt somebody’s feelings.
We buried our dead.
And we knew who killed them.
Somewhere along the way, that clarity became unfashionable.
Political leaders became more worried about accusations of Islamophobia than about confronting Islamist extremism. Universities became increasingly comfortable treating America as the villain in practically every story. And New York politics moved far enough left that ideas that would have been politically radioactive in the years immediately following September 11 now barely raise an eyebrow.
Look at where we are.
The mayor of the city attacked on September 11 is facing a petition from tens of thousands of people asking him to stay away from Ground Zero.
The governor is being asked by retired Port Authority officers to do the same.
And the people making those requests include men and women who actually buried somebody because of what happened there.
Maybe they’re trying to tell us something.
I’ve watched the Democrat Party change over the years.
I remember when Democrats were mostly people with different ideas about how to help the poor.
Their policies usually didn’t work.
But I understood the argument.
This is something else.
A political movement increasingly afraid to say the words “Islamist terrorism” while portions of its own coalition flirt openly with ideas that are hostile to American law, American institutions and, in some cases, America itself.
And now we’re having the argument at Ground Zero.
That’s what gets me.
Ground Zero.
There are approximately eight million other places in New York City where politicians can conduct their ideological experiments.
Leave this one alone.
Because September 11 belongs first to the people who never came home.
It belongs to the firefighters whose photographs still hang in firehouses across the city.
It belongs to the police officers who walked into hell.
It belongs to the children who grew up without mothers and fathers.
It belongs to people like Giovanni Galante, who has lived twenty-five years without his wife.
They don’t owe politicians a backdrop.
They don’t owe anybody a lesson in tolerance.
And they certainly shouldn’t have to beg elected officials to understand why this particular piece of American ground is different.
Twenty-five years ago we promised we would never forget.
I don’t think the families forgot.
I don’t think the cops forgot.
I don’t think the firefighters forgot.
I don’t think the people who watched those towers fall forgot.
But some of our political leaders apparently became so determined to move beyond the lessons of September 11 that they moved beyond the memory of it too.
The retired Port Authority officers aren’t asking for much.
One day.
One place.
No politics.
“Please allow us to remember in peace.”
They’ve earned that.
Let them.