Today is, of course, the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed 2,977 people in New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Flight 93. This blog has existed since January 2003, and we have certainly reflected on that day over the years. In last year’s, I highlighted these:

• “9/11 Convention,” James Joyner, 2004
• “Remembering 911,” James Joyner, 2005
• “Fifth Anniversary of 9/11 Attacks,” James Joyner, 2006
• “Remembering 9/11 Without Obsessing Over It,” Doug Mataconis, 2007
• “Have We Forgotten 9/11?” James Joyner, 2008
• “Commemorating Anniversaries,” James Joyner, 2009
• “December 7, 1951 v. September 11, 2011,” Doug Mataconis, 2011 (10th anniversary)
• “A Decade of Lost Freedom,” Doug Mataconis, 2011
• “No Football On 9/11?” Doug Mataconis, 2011
• “9/11’s Legacy Of Fear,” Doug Mataconis, 2012
• “The Lost National ‘Unity’ Of September 11th,” Doug Mataconis, 2016
• “9/11 And America’s Forever War,” Doug Mataconis, 2018
• “9/11/01, Eighteen Years Later,” Doug Mataconis, 2019
• “9/11 at 20,” James Joyner, 2021
• “9/11 at 22“, James Joyner, 2023

My co-blogger Steven Taylor and I were both teaching at the then-Troy State University that morning and experienced the unfolding events together. As noted in my 20th anniversary post,

I was on my way to my office at Troy State, which is on Central Time, when I heard news that the first plane had struck the tower and had the initial impression that it must have been a small plane. By the time I arrived and had my first cup of coffee with Steven Taylor, it became clear that something far more sinister had happened. We spent most of the day watching the events unfold on television (classes were soon canceled) and the next few days talking through the events with students, putting on a panel discussion for the school, and the like. I moved to the DC area just ahead of the first anniversary.

I’ve spent the last thirteen anniversaries the way I’ll spend today: teaching mid-grade officers at Marine Corps University. My first cohort would have been in college or brand new second lieutenants and ensigns on that fateful day. Almost all of them were veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, the Marine students will attend class in their dress blue delta uniforms. We will otherwise not mark the occasion. Which is perhaps just as well, as they would have been in grade school when the planes struck the towers.

Which comports with a long-running theme in these reflections. Despite the admonitions to Never Forget, it’s inevitable that we will. Not those of us who were old enough to experience the event in real time, at least so long as our facilities are intact. But my kids, born between August 1999 and June 2011, have no personal memory of the day. Any commemorations would likely ring hollow. While December 7, 1941 may well live in infamy, we don’t tend to mark the occasion anymore. Aside from historians, no one remembers the Maine.

A quarter century is a milestone that tends to get some fanfare, but there are remarkably few features in today’s press. Most I could find use the anniversary to push other agendas.

• NYT Editorial Board, “How the Heroic Response to 9/11 Went Awry“
• Peter Bergen, NYT, “We’ve Forgotten the Most Important Lessons of 9/11“
• Radley Balko, NYT, “Civil Libertarians Knew This Would Happen. We Should Have Listened.“
• Warren P. Strobel, WaPo, “After 9/11, the U.S. built an anti-terror apparatus. Trump is using it at home.“
• The Economist, “How counterterrorism has empowered Donald Trump’s imperial presidency“
• Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic (“What Bush Understood That Trump Doesn’t“)
• Frank Gardner, BBC, “Spies, strategies and missed opportunities: How the lessons of 9/11 are still being learnt“
• Douglas J. Feith, WaPo, “The 9/11 response got the most important thing right“
• David French, NYT, “The War on Terror Did Not Fail“
• Marc A. Thiessen, WaPo, “I was at the Pentagon on 9/11. Here’s what surprises me 25 years later.“
• WaPo, “Among three 9/11 sites, only the Pentagon still lacks a memorial visitor center“

Ultimately, that’s a natural evolution of things. It’s a stock-in-trade of column-writing to use current events or anniversaries as a hook to push a pre-existing agenda. That 9/11 falls into that category a quarter-century later is to be expected.