Americans are looking back on the horror and legacy of 9/11, gathering Monday at memorials, firehouses, city halls and elsewhere to observe the 22nd anniversary of the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil.
Commemorations stretch from the attack sites — at New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania — to Alaska and beyond. President Joe Biden is due at a ceremony on a military base in Anchorage.
His visit, en route to Washington, D.C., from a trip to India and Vietnam, is a reminder that the impact of 9/11 was felt in every corner of the nation, however remote. The hijacked plane attacks claimed nearly 3,000 lives and reshaped American foreign policy and domestic fears.
After Covid killed more people daily than 9/11 every day for a year and no one cared, I’m just done caring a single event that happened decades ago when a larger tragedy more recent was ignored.
That’s what makes terrorism terrorism. It not only inflicts casualties, it causes terror. A terror that impacts individual and collective thoughts. It impacts policy and government action.