How 9/11 Changed Me — and Changed America: A Personal Reflection

September 11, 2001 changed the world—and it changed me.

I remember first hearing about the attacks on the radio. Like so many others, I rushed to the television and sat in shock as the events unfolded. For days afterward, I couldn’t sleep. The images replayed endlessly in my mind, not just the collapse of the towers, but the sheer disbelief that something like this could happen here.

But while I mourned the lives lost that day, I also came to mourn something else: what our country became in the years that followed.

Honoring the Lives Lost

I didn’t know anyone personally who died on September 11th, but I still grieve for them. Nearly 3,000 innocent people — workers, firefighters, police officers, airline passengers, and so many others — had their lives cut short in an instant. Behind each number was a person with a story, a family, and a future they never got to live.

For those who survived, and for the families who carry the weight of that loss every day, the pain never fully goes away. Even from a distance, I felt it. The grief was not just national; it was deeply human. To this day, I pause to remember the lives taken and the heroism shown in those awful hours — from first responders who ran toward danger to ordinary people who helped strangers escape.

That tragedy deserves our respect, our mourning, and our remembrance. And it deserves better than the way our nation responded afterward.

The Shift in Our Politics and Freedoms

Almost immediately, the political climate changed. Fear became the fuel of governance. Leaders on the right seized the moment to consolidate intelligence and military power. Out of that fear came the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, and ICE—agencies designed to promise safety but which also chipped away at freedoms in the name of security.

I’ve written more about that here: The Post-9/11 Erosion of Civil Liberties. But the short version is this: our relationship with government was forever altered. Trust gave way to surveillance. Dissent became suspect. And “security” became a justification for powers that would once have been unthinkable.

A Nation at War Abroad

The attacks were horrific, but what came after was its own kind of tragedy. Our leaders framed the response as justice, but so much of it was blind rage. We launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that dragged on for decades, costing hundreds of thousands of lives abroad and thousands of American lives as well. We spent trillions of dollars chasing vengeance, often against people who had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.

I didn’t have a personal connection to those wars, but I felt the weight of them as an American. Every headline, every news clip, every announcement of more troops being sent — it was like watching our country lose its way in slow motion. The America I believed in, one that prided itself on freedom and moral leadership, was being consumed by endless war. Violence bred more violence, and in chasing security through force, we lost a part of our soul.

A Personal Reckoning

Before 9/11, I thought of myself as conservative. I valued tradition, stability, and personal responsibility — ideas that felt safe and familiar. But as I wrestled with what unfolded in the years afterward, I began to understand that “liberal” wasn’t the dirty word I had been taught to think it was.

At its root, liberalism is about freedom. In the classical sense, it means protecting individual rights — free speech, freedom of religion, equality under the law — and limiting government to prevent it from trampling those rights. Those are values conservatives often claim, but they are liberal at their core.

In modern American politics, liberalism goes further. It recognizes that rights are meaningless if only some people can exercise them. Government, then, has a role to play in making sure opportunity is real: providing social safety nets, defending civil rights, and checking abuses of power. That doesn’t mean government should control everything — it means government should step in where unchecked power or neglect would otherwise crush people’s freedom.

And in everyday language, to be liberal is simply to be open-minded, empathetic, and willing to accept difference. It’s about caring enough to look beyond yourself and insisting that compassion is not weakness but strength.

Seen this way, I realized there’s nothing shameful about being liberal. If anything, our country’s deepest problems come from having too little of it — too little empathy, too little defense of freedom when it’s most at risk, and too little willingness to ensure opportunity for all.

Remembering, and Choosing Again

Every year, 9/11 reminds me not only of the lives taken on that day, but of the choices we made afterward. We could have pursued those directly responsible with focus and restraint. Instead, we launched wars that had little to do with the attacks themselves. We built Guantanamo, normalized torture, and let fear justify policies that betrayed our values.

We chose vengeance over justice. And in doing so, we lost something of ourselves.

This reflection is dedicated to the memory of those we lost on September 11th, 2001 — the workers, the first responders, the passengers, and all the ordinary people whose lives were cut short in that tragedy.

To honor them means more than mourning. It means remembering the America they lived in — one defined not by fear, but by freedom and possibility. If we carry their memory forward with compassion, courage, and empathy, then we can build a country worthy of their sacrifice. We cannot undo the choices of the past, but we can choose a better path now.

That is how we truly honor the victims: by becoming the America they deserved.