Visiting the Flight 93 Memorial in 2024

Last week, on the way to a wedding in Ohio, we stopped at the Flight 93 Memorial near Stoysville, Pennsylvania. It is a somber place in the middle of nowhere. The weather was crisp and cool with brilliant blue skies, similar to the weather on September 11, 2001. A large boulder placed in a field marks the exact spot of the crash. At the visitor’s center, a number of interactive displays detail the tragic events that occurred that day, forever changing a rural part of our state, as well as our entire country.

Perhaps the most heart-wrenching aspects of the displays are the recorded phone conversations from passengers to their loved ones. The plane left Newark late, so passengers began to realize that something terrible was going on and that, in all likelihood, they were going to die a horrific death. I keep hearing the voice of the woman who called her sister, tearfully explaining where all her important papers were and giving her the combination to the safe.

Volumes have been written about how these ordinary people saved our Capitol from being destroyed. They were beyond heroes, they were saints, they were the best of humanity. And yet, I couldn’t help thinking, how, in 2024, a significant number of us will blithely vote for someone who encouraged his supporters to destroy the Capitol because he lost an election. To break windows and violently attack anyone who got in their way. Who had a scaffold ready to hang the Vice President of the United States. Who trashed offices and defecated in the hallways while the President sat and watched it all on television, refusing to stop it. For hours. Do we honestly just brush that off because we’re angry about the price of gas and food or worried that an immigrant mowing lawns or picking fruit is going to receive benefits from the government that rightfully belong to us?

We are a different people from who were in 2001, and it scares the crap out of me. There are no “yes, buts” in this election. None. I wish there were. I wish this was an election between two qualified candidates with different approaches about how to govern, which is what should happen in a healthy democracy. I miss that. I miss reasonable conversations with people about who they support. It’s a shame (and a learning loss for our students) that schools can no longer hold mock elections. A friend who stood in line recently to hear a candidate was beyond appalled at the way that person’s supporters spoke about members of the opposing party. I don’t like being afraid to put a bumper sticker on my car or wear a tee-shirt supporting a candidate, but that’s the reality in which we’re living.

I remember how we came together after 9/11, how we supported each other in our suffering whether it was making donations to the local fire company or going to lower Manhattan and saying, “How can I help?” We were proud and courageous and united as a country. We’ve lost that, and I’m not sure what it’s going to take to bring it back.

Those brave souls who wrenched that plane away from the hijackers knew they were all going to die but by God, they weren’t going to let it be under the smoking ruins of the rotunda of the Capitol. Let’s keep those people in mind when we vote.