Security should defend liberty—not become the price of it.
Twenty-five years ago today, Americans watched something almost unimaginable unfold. We watched airplanes become weapons. We watched buildings burn. We watched people leap from impossible heights rather than be consumed by fire. We watched police officers, firefighters and ordinary citizens run toward danger when every human instinct must have been telling them to run the other way.
And aboard United Flight 93, ordinary Americans learned what was happening, understood what was at stake, and acted. They didn’t wait for the government or for instructions from someone in authority. Faced with an almost impossible circumstance, individuals made a choice.
That has always struck me as one of the most powerful lessons of September 11, 2001: the individual matters.
Every year we say, Never Forget. Twenty-five years later, I find myself wondering what exactly we are promising not to forget.
Certainly, we must remember the nearly 3,000 innocent people murdered that day. We should remember the firefighters climbing stairwells while everyone else was coming down, the police officers and first responders who rushed toward danger, and the military families who would spend the next two decades carrying the burden of wars born from that morning.
But perhaps Never Forget should mean something more. We should also remember what those terrorists attacked.
They attacked a free people.
In the years that followed, Americans understandably demanded security. We were frightened, angry and determined that something like September 11 never happen again. Government responded with new powers, new agencies, new surveillance capabilities and new ways of collecting and sharing information. Some of those changes undoubtedly improved our ability to identify threats, but twenty-five years later we should be mature enough to ask what else came with them.
We became accustomed to surveillance that would have seemed extraordinary to previous generations. Cameras became ubiquitous. License plates could be recorded and stored. The phone in our pocket became capable of documenting our movements with remarkable precision. Private companies accumulated enormous amounts of information about our behavior, while government databases became larger, faster and increasingly interconnected.
Now artificial intelligence, facial recognition and automated enforcement are making it possible to analyze information on a scale that would have sounded like science fiction on September 10, 2001.
America does not have a Chinese-style social-credit system, and we shouldn’t pretend that it does. The more important question is whether we are building the technological architecture that could someday make unprecedented monitoring and control possible. Once such powers exist, history gives us little reason to assume that every future government official will use them with the restraint their creators promised.
That should concern conservatives and liberals alike, because civil liberty isn’t supposed to depend upon which political party happens to control the machinery.
Liberty also rarely disappears because someone announces that freedom has been canceled. More often, government power accumulates through thousands of individually defensible decisions. A new regulation seems reasonable. A new fee is only a few dollars. Another camera promises safer streets. Another database will make government more efficient. Another emergency creates another exception. Each decision can be defended on its own, while the cumulative effect receives far less attention.
That brings me to something considerably less dramatic.
This past year, I spent countless hours working with ordinary Oregonians gathering signatures to repeal a permit imposed on people using human-powered boats. Compared with the enormity of September 11, arguing over whether someone should need a government permit to paddle a kayak sounds almost embarrassingly trivial.
But maybe that is exactly why it matters.
The First Amendment doesn’t reserve the right to petition government for history’s great injustices. It protects our right to petition government for a redress of our grievances, including the small ones. When government does something we believe is unnecessary, excessive or simply wrong, we have the right to organize our neighbors, gather signatures, speak at a council meeting, write legislators, challenge an ordinance and ultimately ask our fellow citizens to change the law.
That isn’t obstruction. It isn’t extremism. It is how a republic is supposed to work.
My experience gathering signatures reinforced something I think we too easily forget. Most people do not believe they have much influence over government. They watch national politics, complain about Washington, argue on social media and understandably conclude that they are one person among hundreds of millions. Yet put a petition in someone’s hand, bring twenty people to a council meeting, call a legislator, organize a neighborhood or challenge a local policy, and suddenly the relationship changes. Government stops being something happening somewhere else and citizenship becomes an action rather than an identity.
That may be the connection between something as small as a paddle permit and something as consequential as September 11.
A republic cannot be preserved entirely from Washington because a republic does not ultimately reside in Washington. It resides in the willingness of ordinary citizens to exercise the rights they inherited. The First Amendment is powerful because it assumes that government will sometimes be wrong and that the individual citizen must retain the ability to say so.
September 11 confronted America with a terrible paradox that has followed free societies throughout history. Government has an obligation to protect its citizens, yet there is no such thing as perfect safety in a free society. A government powerful enough to know where everyone is, what everyone is doing, whom everyone is talking to and whether everyone is obeying every rule might promise extraordinary security. It would also possess extraordinary power over the people it claims to protect.
That is the bargain we must continually examine.
Twenty-five years after September 11, hostile governments and terrorist organizations have not disappeared. Iran and its proxies remain threats, terrorism continues in different forms around the world, and another generation of Americans has learned that technology cannot eliminate evil or guarantee safety. There will always be another threat that can be used to justify another expansion of authority.
That does not mean every security measure is tyranny, every camera is Big Brother or every government official is plotting against our liberty. That kind of thinking makes serious arguments about government power easier to dismiss. It means something much simpler: free citizens should require government to justify the powers it exercises over them, and we should periodically ask whether powers granted during yesterday’s emergency are still necessary today.
Perhaps that is what Never Forget should mean after twenty-five years.
We remember the people we lost, but we should also remember the character of the nation that was attacked. America was never exceptional because government promised to make us perfectly safe. It was exceptional because generations accepted that liberty carries risk and nevertheless chose self-government over being governed for their own good.
The passengers of Flight 93 offer perhaps the most profound example. Their story was not one of passive dependence upon authority. In the final moments of their lives, ordinary people gathered the information available to them, made a decision and took responsibility for what happened next. Their actions almost certainly prevented an even greater tragedy. They remind us that citizenship, at its best, is not passive.
Most of us will never be asked to demonstrate courage remotely comparable to theirs. Our obligations are much more ordinary. They happen when we decide whether to pay attention to what our government is doing, whether to question something that doesn’t make sense, whether to participate when participation is inconvenient, and whether we are willing to defend someone else’s liberty as strongly as our own.
Those little decisions accumulate too.
Just as government power can grow one reasonable-sounding increment at a time, a culture of liberty is preserved one citizen at a time. That is why the person gathering signatures over an obscure regulation matters. It is why the citizen sitting through a tedious city council meeting matters. It is why the person asking an uncomfortable question matters. None of those acts will make a history book, but together they determine whether self-government remains something Americans practice or merely something Americans remember.
Twenty-five years after September 11, Never Forget should therefore be more than remembrance of a terrible day. It should be a reminder of what we intend to keep.
We can demand that our government defend this country without giving it unlimited power over the people who live here. We can pursue security without pretending government can guarantee safety. We can use technology to protect people while still drawing lines around privacy and individual liberty. Those aren’t contradictions. They are the difficult responsibilities that come with governing a free society.
The greatest tribute we can offer those who died on September 11 is not to build a country so frightened of the next attack that we gradually surrender the character of the country that was attacked.
We should remain vigilant against those who would harm us, certainly. But we must remain equally vigilant about preserving the constitutional republic that generations before us entrusted to our care. If fear convinces us to trade away the liberty, privacy, self-government and individual responsibility that define a free people, then greater safety will have come at an enormous price.
Twenty-five years later, that is what I choose to remember.
The republic was never promised to us permanently. It was handed to us with the expectation that we would keep it.
Never forget what was taken from us on September 11, 2001. And never forget what remains ours to preserve.
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