Never Forget: 25th Anniversary of September 11th, 2001

Michael Smerconish (0:00)

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George W. Bush (1:01)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America.

SPEAKER_4 (1:04)

This is SiriusXM's POTUS Channel 124

SPEAKER_5 (1:08)

In that moment, I think we all matured maybe a little bit.

SPEAKER_6 (1:11)

It helped me gain a new perspective of the world.

SPEAKER_4 (1:14)

Welcome to a special edition of the Michael Smerconish Program, a tribute to the 25th anniversary of 9-11.

SPEAKER_6 (1:21)

It helped me come to a realization that the world is not a perfect, harmonious place.

SPEAKER_7 (1:25)

Obviously, they've tightened up security in the last couple of years.

Lawrence Wright (1:28)

I was alive and I was here when it happened.

SPEAKER_7 (1:31)

Keep a dream alive of America, how we want to be and how we need to be.

SPEAKER_5 (1:35)

You know, we had to see something so tragic like that actually happen.

Alice Hoagland (1:41)

I am a part of this.

SPEAKER_4 (1:43)

Now, here's Michael Smerconish.

Michael Smerconish (1:46)

25 years, I'll never forget where I was, and if you're of a certain age, neither will you. I was in a courtroom in Philadelphia's City Hall. It was day two of a civil trial when a member of the judge's staff, the tip staff, we'd say, said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York City. I thought it was an air traffic control mistake. And by afternoon, I was in a radio studio talking about a man named Bin Laden, whom I barely could have identified that morning. You'll hear some of that tape this hour, and I promise you, it does not sound like a man who knew what was coming. Each one of us who was old enough has a version of that story. Where we were, who we called, what we watched, and for how long. For a quarter century, I've described 9-11 as the December 7th of our lives, and I meant it as a measure of scale. This year, I hear it differently. I hear it as a warning. Because Pearl Harbor was also the day that would live in infamy, and it did for a while. By its 25th anniversary in 1966, the country had moved on to Vietnam. The men who were on the Arizona and the Oklahoma, they never forgot. The country in the way the countries do put it in a drawer. That's not a failure of character. It's what time does. And what worries me on this, the 25th anniversary, is how much faster it's happening to us and why. Think about what the world looked like on September 11, 2001 The Internet was something you dialed into over a phone line, and half of us didn't. The iPhone was six years away. There was no Facebook. No YouTube. No Twitter. No feed. If you wanted to know what happened, you turned on a television. And there were only a handful of places to turn for news, and everybody you knew was watching one of them. We still had a monoculture. We watched the same shows on the same nights. We talked about them the next morning, in person, at the office, because that's where we went. COVID was 19 years away. Nobody worked from the kitchen table. We were not yet sorted into media silos the way that we are today. We were, without even thinking about it, in each other's company. And that's why the country came together in the way that we did. Not because we were better people in 2001, but because we were still in the same room. The flags on the overpasses, the lines at the blood banks, the members of Congress singing on the Capitol steps. Do you remember?

A 90% approval rating for a president who had won with fewer votes than his opponent just 10 months earlier.