I'll keep this short. I've written at some length in this space before about my thoughts on 9/11, along with where I was that day and how it impacted my generation.
It's worth remembering that the targets of terrorism are the living, with the goal of getting them to react out of fear in a way that suits the perpetrator's aims. The antidote to that, as it is with personal trauma, is to remember and act as necessary, but to refuse to let it define the survivors' future. That's a way of giving really horrible people way too much power, even after they're dead.
So going forward, don't forget, but let's not let 9/11 define how we deal with the world, especially not by allowing its memory to keep us in a culture of constant panic. We are, I know, better than that.
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