I have a daughter, born the year after 9/11, who thinks it odd that I have a button with a caption that says “Never forget” under a cropped image of one of the World Trade Center towers, showing people hanging out of windows just before they jumped.

On one hand, she’s right. Never forget?

For those of us who were adults on Sept. 11, 2001, it’s not like we could forget, even if we wanted to. That morning took its place atop an ever accumulating list of heart-rending “Where were you?” moments that populate our long-term memories.

Where were you when the Challenger exploded? Where were you when Princess Diana died? Where were you when JFK Jr.’s plane went down? Where were you when you heard about Columbine or Sandy Hook? Where were you when 2,977 people casually going about their day died while the rest of us watched, aghast, as the events unfolded on live TV?

Ninety-three percent of Americans who were 10 or older on 9/11 remember exactly what we were doing when we heard the news, Pew Research Center found. And what we did for much of that day was watch TV; the RAND Corp. reported that Americans watched eight hours of live coverage that day, with a fifth of us watching 13 hours or more of coverage.

In the aftermath, “Never forget” became a rallying cry, akin to “Lest we forget” after the second World War. But does never forgetting mean forever holding the most horrific images in our minds, and replaying them every year, even though they’re not good for our psychological health?

Apparently so.

For the past two weeks, social media has been flooded with videos from that terrible day, some of which is billed as “never-seen-before footage” and some of which seemed to be posted not for some greater good, but for “engagement farming” — getting views in order to get paid.

We’re told that it’s important to see these images because 1) never forget and 2) because there’s a generation of young American adults for whom 9/11 is a page from a history book, not a lived experience.

That seems a little bit like preaching to the choir.

In a conversation on Reddit about young people who don’t really care about 9/11, a 20-year-old weighed in, saying that his generation grew up with 9/11 being an occasion for a strange history lesson: “An awkward minute of silence to be sat through, news coverage shoved down our throats instead of learning math. Every teacher giving their 5-minute talk about where they were and how it impacted them.”

This person did eventually grasp the gravity of 9/11 and why it bears commemorating, but only after serious investigation on his own. The reminiscing of others wasn’t enough.

Which helps me to understand, just a little, why my kids’ eyes glaze over just a little bit, when I try to explain to them what it was like to live through 9/11.

What it was like to so deeply feel that sorrow, that anger, that fear.

And also, what it was like to have a president with a 91% approval rating. What it was like to drive down streets where seemingly every house, car and highway overpass displayed an American flag or two or 20. What it was like to feel united. American kin.

To those of us who lived through it, “Never forget” seems as much a wish as it is a sobering reminder of what evil is capable of. It’s a wish for the comfort we found in each other and in patriotism in the aftermath of that horrible day.

That’s what I wish my children, and all the post-9/11 adults, could experience. But for too many of them, their memories are not first responders rushing into the towers, but “defund the police.”

For anyone looking for a way to “never forget” without watching traumatizing videos, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation offers a compendium of first-person accounts of survivors, including first responders who were on the scene that day.

Frank Siller created the foundation to honor his youngest brother, Stephen Siller, a New York City firefighter and father of five who was off duty when the planes hit, but went to help and died when the towers collapsed. The foundation is known for providing mortgage-free homes for seriously injured veterans and first responders, and for the families of those who die in service to their country or communities. It’s a good example of what “never forgetting” can look like when directed toward healing and not toward anger and bitterness.

In his new memoir, “Let Us Do Good,” Frank Siller writes that he and his siblings made a conscious decision to not be consumed by bitterness when their brother died. As “secular Franciscans” — Catholics who follow the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi, but don’t enter a cloistered, religious life — their parents instilled in their children a quote from the saint: “While we have time, let us do good.”

Frank Siller has spent the past 25 years trying to do just that, from establishing the foundation to walking 552 miles (from Washington, D.C., to Ground Zero) to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11. At the time of the walk, he was 67 and had recently suffered a heart attack.

As someone who has seen ads for Tunnel to Towers for years without knowing the story behind it, “Let Us Do Good” was the “never forget” story I needed to read. It’s not so much the story of one man, or even his late brother, a “miracle baby” born when his father was 49 and his mother 44. It’s just as much about their parents, who raised seven children in a way that left a “ripple effect of good.”

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Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has a new memoir, and in an excerpt he reveals a part of it that he was hesitant to write: how he reached out to Joe Biden and Donald Trump with a passionate request.

“Both Biden and Trump are two of the most polarizing presidents in the history of our country. Just reading my interactions with these two people likely caused you to have an emotional reaction. ... At least a couple people just threw this book across the room in disgust. Trust me, you aren’t alone.”

Excerpt from Spencer Cox’s ‘Off Ramp’: Stopping the spiral of retribution

Predicting the future is a fool’s game, Jay Evensen likes to say. But people do it anyway, and it’s interesting to see how their predictions turn out, like some he came across from 50 years ago.

“Among my favorites were those written by fifth graders in Tipton, Indiana (current population 5,275). ‘We might be living in space, or we might be driving airplanes for cars,’ speculated young Becky Allen. ‘The men might not have to work when they don’t want to and still get paid.’ I give her points for predicting the guaranteed wage plan so popular today with the far left, although nothing like that has yet to be implemented.”

What did bicentennial Americans think life would be like today?

It’s not just data centers — there’s a backlash against almost everything these days, Valerie Hudson writes.

“Something is stirring in the American zeitgeist, and the year 2026 has become a pivot point. Americans have moved from a sense of almost resigned desperation in the face of corporate overreach turbocharged by technological advances to a very different emotional stance, enunciated most eloquently by Delsia Bareof Mason County, Kentucky, responding to a data center developer’s $26 million offer for her land: ‘Kick rocks and don’t come back!’”

The age of backlash is here. Americans have stopped rolling over

And speaking of data centers, in last week’s Right to the Point subscriber poll, we considered how motivated we would be to protest one. Not very, it seems, with a majority of us saying we wouldn’t protest a data center going up near our home. That’s a bit of good news in a year that hasn’t been going so great for AI companies.

In other news, if you missed it, here’s my story about an eye-opening finding from the Survey Center on American Life, which asked both men and women whether they view the opposite sex as the cause of the challenges they face. There was one demographic in particular whose answer popped out.

And finally, in the Take of the Week, here’s Michael Smerconish on the end of the Lindsay Clancy trial:

“Somewhere in Massachusetts is a man who sat through weeks of unbearable testimony, held a view, and would not surrender it under pressure from 11 peers. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe not. Either way, that’s the job.”

As always, thank you for reading and being a part of the Right to the Point community. Feel free to reach out at any time with ideas and comments: [email protected] or via direct message on X at @grahamtoday.

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