09/11/2026
Good morning, Wildcats. Today we observe the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks in 2001. Since most people in the building today weren’t even alive at that time, I’d like to give a little context.
We woke on 9/11/2001 to the most perfect of late summer days – deep blue skies without a cloud in sight, perfectly sunny and warm. I want to add that it’s very difficult these days to conceive of how much that weather really typified the feeling of that time. I don’t want to give the impression that the late 90’s and early years of the 2000’s leading up to 9/11 were perfect – they were not. But there was an overall impression that things were heading in the right direction, if even with bumps in the road. The Cold War with the Soviet Union had ended about a decade earlier, and things were largely peaceful. We were optimistic and hopeful about the present and the future.
At 8:46 that morning, a plane hit the first tower of the World Trade Center. Most thought it was an accident. How could that be done on purpose?
Everyone’s minds changed a little later at 9:03 when the second plane hit the south tower. I had turned on the news in my study hall at Concord High School in New Hampshire when we heard about the first plane. We saw the second hit. We knew our world was changing in front of our eyes.
A half hour later at 9:37 that was confirmed, when the third plane hit the Pentagon outside Washington, DC. Things happened quickly then, with the South tower in New York collapsing at 9:59, Flight 93 crashing into a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers revolted against their hijackers at 10:03, and the North Tower falling down at 10:28. New York City was covered in ash and dust.
All told 2,977 victims had died. In the resulting Global Wars on Terror, the US lost an additional 7,000 service members. We remember all of them today.
But we also remember another victim: our overall optimism and hopefulness as a people. In the past 25 years we have become more fearful, more anxious, more unsure of who we truly are and where we are heading. The chaos of the world we live in today - the world that most of you in this building were born into - is not the reality that the rest of us grew up in. Our very difficult task as a people is to figure out how we can get that back.
For now, though, we remember that day 25 years ago. We remember the lives lost, the families changed, the first responders who sacrificed everything by running into the buildings, and the innocence lost. We remember, and we think about where we need to go in the future.
Please join me and the rest of the nation for a moment of silence in memory of those we lost 25 years ago this morning.
