GANA

Every September 11, America pauses to “remember the victims.” We hear solemn voices, flag-draped ceremonies, and speeches about unity. But with today’s polarized and divided climate, we need to ask a harder question: who exactly are you honoring?

The nearly 3,000 people who died on 9/11 weren’t a monolith. They were a cross-section of humanity. They were immigrants from over ninety countries. They were Black, Latino, and Asian workers. They were Muslims and Sikhs. They were Native Americans, often invisible in the national story, yet present, working, and dying like everyone else. They were federal employees at the Pentagon. They were janitors, dishwashers, and office staff earning just enough to pay rent. They were women, queer people, and yes, even transgender people. They were people of faith and people without it. They were, in short, the very communities that many in today’s America choose to vilify.

And that’s the contradiction. The same political forces that wrap themselves in “Never Forget” every September are the ones spending the other 364 days scapegoating immigrants for economic decline, stoking fear of Muslims, stripping away LGBTQ rights, erasing Native voices, demonizing the poor, and pushing a brand of Christian nationalism that denies anyone outside their narrow mold.

It makes the mourning hollow. If you can’t honor these groups while they are alive, if you marginalize them every day, then what does it mean to honor them in death?

After 9/11, thousands of young men and women were sent into battle. Many never came back. We’re told they fought for “freedom” and “America.” But ask yourself: who were they really fighting for?

Were they fighting for immigrants? For Black, Latino, Asian, and Native workers? For Muslims and South Asians who were demonized in the very country they called home? Were they fighting for federal employees, for their fellow soldiers, for the poor and working class? Were they fighting for women, for the LGBTQ community, for every marginalized group that makes up the real fabric of this nation?

The truth is, they were fighting for all of us. They gave their lives in service to a country that doesn’t always value every one of its people equally. And if your intolerance, hatred, or racism keeps you from seeing those communities as fully human, then you’ve missed the point. They were human beings no more, no less, just like you. Just like me. Then, and now.

We shouldn’t need another national tragedy to rediscover the unity that briefly existed in those dark days after 9/11. The hypocrisy has to stop. You can’t mourn the dead on Monday and return on Tuesday to scapegoating the very people who died beside them. If you do, you’re a bigger hypocrite than the elite who manipulate division to keep us apart.

To “never forget” should mean more than reciting numbers and waving flags. It should mean remembering who those people really were. It should mean respecting the workers, the immigrants, the Native people, the queer and trans folks, the Muslims, and the people of color who are still here. It should mean recognizing that their lives mattered not just on the day they were lost, but in the lives they lived and the communities they built.

Honoring 9/11 means honoring everyone. Not just the version of America you’re comfortable with, but the real America, the messy, diverse, complicated America that stood in those towers, in that Pentagon, and on those planes. Anything less is an empty ritual.