After the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, rescue dogs searching the rubble for survivors started becoming dejected at not finding living people to save — so much so that their handlers started staging faux rescues just to keep their spirits up.
I recount this not to remind everyone Don’t forget the dogs! but to highlight the enormity and totality of our loss on 9/11. But in remembering that unmitigable tragedy, I also wanted to highlight the way people responded and showed what they were capable of.
I was in college at the time in Athens, Georgia, and one thing that stands out in my memory is that so many people were signing up to give blood at the Red Cross — blood for the injured survivors of the disaster — that they were having to turn hopeful donors away.
And I remember state troopers driving at top speed from border to border, handing off blood like a bucket brigade up to New York to save those lives, not knowing at the time that there weren’t enough survivors to need it. Six states away, there was basically nothing we could do to help, and all people had to offer was their literal life’s blood so that’s what they gave.
When Fred Rogers told us to look for the helpers, it wasn’t so we could take comfort in the knowledge that someone is doing something — it was so we could also become helpers, making things better to whatever even minor extent we could.
We saw people running into the disaster and people supporting the ones who ran in. We saw countries coming together to support the U.S., even as many of them were mourning the loss of their own citizens in the tragedy. We saw people supporting others in mourning. We even saw people reaching out to the Muslim community, supporting them as best they could during a time rank with fear and hatred, offering compassion and solidarity and even physical security, even as that community was offering aid and shelter to others.
It didn’t last forever. I wish it could have, but eventually people had less to contribute and more time to think about fear and hate. But just for a time, a heartful time after a horrible event, we looked at the world as a place we could make better, come together to make our communities and our country a better place than the unfathomable thing that had just been done to us.
Of course, that was 25 years ago, and a lot has changed since then. Time changes everything, and we always would have changed over 25 years, but what happened on 9/11 changed us then and set us on a different path for future change.
We, as people and as a society, will never regain what we had and who we were before 9/11 and immediately after it — time moves only forward at a rate of one day per day. But we can be inspired by it. We can be inspired by the way we took something horrible and responded in a way that made something as beautiful as it could have been under the circumstances, out of rubble and tragedy. We can be today’s version of the people we so briefly were then.
We say “Never Again” about the fear, the vulnerability, the inhumanity, the the violation we experienced that day. And we should. But I think we can hold onto the unity, the compassion, and the drive to help without the immediacy of unspeakable tragedy to bring us together.
9/11 is 25 years past, but it still isn’t over. Even now, remains are being identified and families are finally able to inter their loved ones, and people are fighting to help the helpers who have suffered illness thanks to their selflessness. And we don’t have to be done with the sense of humanity that brought us together on and after that day.
Today, we remember the people we lost on the planes, and in the towers, and the ones who ran into the rubble, and the ones who have died since. And maybe in their honor, in these rough and contentious and divisive and sometimes hateful times, we can make an actual, concerted, intentional decision to be as helpful and caring and empathetic as we’ve proved we’re able to be.