9/11 Lessons on Human Connection: 25 Years Later

Twenty-five years ago, I was in Kosovo working for the United Nations when America was attacked.

I still remember watching the images coming across the television on September 11, 2001—the smoke, the towers, the confusion, people running through the streets of New York, and families desperately trying to reach loved ones, not knowing whether they were safe. The attack happened thousands of miles away, but in Kosovo, it didn't feel that far away.

We knew that kind of fear. Our war had ended only a few years ago, and the wounds were still fresh. Many families were grieving people they had lost. Others were still living with unanswered questions. We knew what it was like to have someone you love leave home and not know whether they would come back. We knew what it was like for an ordinary day to suddenly become a day that divided your life into before and after.

Watching Americans experience that uncertainty felt almost as if the crust on our own wounds had been picked open. Their pain touched ours.

At the time, Americans were serving throughout Kosovo as part of the international presence after the war. What I remember almost as vividly as the attack itself was what happened around me afterward. Kosovo Albanians reached out. People wanted to comfort the Americans who were far from home, to stand beside them, talk with them, grieve with them, and somehow let them know, You are not alone.

There was no strategy behind it. No one needed to organize empathy. We simply understood. We knew what it felt like to have your sense of safety taken from you. We knew grief and uncertainty. We knew what it meant to look at someone you loved and suddenly understand how fragile life really is.

Something happens when you recognize your own pain in another human being. The distance between us and them gets smaller. For all the terrible things war had taken from us, I believe it had given many of us something too: a deeper capacity to recognize suffering. War hadn't made us weaker, and it hadn't made all of us bitter. In some ways, it had made us more human, more empathetic, and more capable of sitting with another person's pain because we weren't afraid of what pain felt like.

That is what I find myself thinking about 25 years later—not only where I was when the towers fell, but what happened between people afterward. We have seen that same pattern again and again. Something terrible happens, and suddenly the walls between us become less important.

After a hurricane, nobody asks who their neighbor voted for before helping remove a tree from their house. When someone is trapped beneath rubble, we don't ask what religion they practice before reaching for their hand. When a family is grieving, we don't need to agree with everything they believe before understanding that their heart is broken.

For a little while, crisis strips away the identities, opinions, and divisions we've spent so much time building around ourselves. We remember the person underneath.

And then the crisis passes. Slowly, we go back to our corners.

That may be what troubles me most as I think about September 11 today: Why does it so often take tragedy to remind us how to be human with one another?

We live in perhaps the most technologically connected period in human history. I can speak to someone across the world in seconds. I can know what thousands of strangers are thinking before I've even had my morning coffee. Yet somehow, we seem to be struggling more and more to actually connect.

We talk at each other instead of with each other. We decide who someone is based on one opinion, one political belief, one social media post, or one label. We listen to respond instead of listening to understand. Sometimes I wonder whether we have become so good at identifying our differences that we have forgotten how to recognize ourselves in one another.

Crisis changes that. For a moment, the question isn't, Are you like me? It becomes, Are you okay? Maybe that's why shared tragedy can create such powerful bonds. It brings us face-to-face with something we spend much of our lives trying not to think about: underneath everything else, we are vulnerable human beings who need one another.

But I don't want tragedy to be our greatest teacher of connection. I don't want us to need another attack, another war, another hurricane, another shooting, another virus, or another devastating loss before we remember how to reach across the space between us.

What if we could learn the lesson without requiring another wound? What if we became curious about the story behind someone's beliefs before deciding who they are? What if we could strongly disagree and still refuse to dehumanize each other? What if we checked on the neighbor before the storm came or made the phone call before life reminded us that someday we won't be able to?

And what if we forgave—not because what happened was acceptable, but because we no longer wanted the wound to decide who we became?

Maybe coming together doesn't have to begin with some enormous act. Maybe it begins in the ordinary moments when we choose curiosity instead of judgment, conversation instead of assumption, and compassion instead of contempt.

Perhaps that is one of the lessons we can carry forward from September 11. Remembering isn't only about looking back. It's also about deciding what we will do with what happened.

Twenty-five years later, I still remember those days in Kosovo. I remember watching a country across the ocean experience unimaginable pain, but I also remember watching people around me respond to that pain with extraordinary humanity. People who had their own wounds still had room in their hearts for someone else's.

There is something both beautiful and heartbreaking about that, because it means the capacity to come together has been inside us all along. We shouldn't need tragedy to unlock it.

Maybe the best way we can honor those whose lives changed forever on September 11 isn't only by remembering how they died or how the world changed that day. Maybe we also remember how people showed up for one another afterward—and then ask ourselves a harder question:

Can we become those people again without needing another tragedy first?

I believe we can. The darkness will always exist, but so will our ability to find one another in it. May we learn to choose that light before darkness forces us to look for it.

May the PEACE be with you.

Teuta