Reflections 25 Years Later

Last week was the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, and I've been reflecting a lot on what I remember from that day, and the legacy the attacks left on people around the globe.

I was about to turn ten and I was sitting in art class when the principal came in and whispered something to my teacher. Within a few minutes the whole school was filing back to our classrooms and then into the auditorium to wait for our parents. I remember not knowing who would actually come get me, because both of my parents worked an hour away.

Our daycare provider ended up collecting all of her kids from the school and brought us back to her house, and because I was the oldest, I was allowed upstairs to watch the big TV and help get lunch together. That's where I watched the towers come down and saw footage from the Pentagon, and while I didn't understand yet what any of it meant, I could read every adult in the room and knew that this was very, very bad. When my mom came to get me instead of my dad, who usually got off work earlier, I understood that he wasn't coming home for a while. He was a battalion chief in the Prince George's County Fire Department, working that day, on duty in case there were more attacks that needed more hands, at the Pentagon or somewhere else in the city nobody could name yet.

In the same week as this anniversary, the city of New York released more than 170,000 pages of records the city insisted for years didn't exist. Mayor Mamdani ordered the release after an advocacy group sued, and the documents came out of boxes that had already been found in a city building the year before. What they showed was that officials knew the air at Ground Zero was full of asbestos and other toxins, and still told the public and first responders working the pile that it was safe to breathe anyway.

James Brosi, president of the city's Uniformed Fire Officers Association, recently responded when asked whether this information would have changed anything that his people would have shown up anyway, because that was never in question, but they would have paused, pushed for better decontamination, and rotated crews to limit exposure, if anyone had told them the truth about what they were breathing. "We know why we took this job," Brosi said. "We don't do that with hesitation." More FDNY members have now died from 9/11-related illness than were killed in the attack itself, and getting those illnesses even recognized took the people who were sick organizing themselves for the better part of two decades. The information that could have protected them existed the whole time, it was just relegated to sit unacknowledged in boxes.

I didn't understand any of it when I was ten, not what I'd just watched, not definitely what was still to come over the next two decades. What I did start to understand, over the years that followed, as I watched us launch and fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through my pre-teen and early teen years, was how big and how different the rest of the world actually was. It struck me how little actually separated me from a boy my own age 'over there' who could be old enough under the rules of that war to be a legitimate target. It all came down to a stroke of geographic luck, nothing I had earned. Over those same years, I felt the same call to service that sent so many people into uniform. For me, it seemed obvious that if we actually addressed the development gaps, the healthcare, the education, the access to food and water, and the basic equal treatment of people in these countries, we could 'save the world' instead of always meeting it with more force. Naive, sure, I was a kid, but it's the throughline that inspired a young tweenager to go on to eventually serve in Peace Corps Mongolia and dedicate his career to working at USAID.

In July 2025 USAID was dismantled. Almost 10 years after I'd walked in the door believing an institution like this could actually be the thing that saved the world, and less than six months after the hardest 8 weeks of my professional career on the Gaza response, including many nights in a hotel bomb shelter. In the end the institution failed not only me, but millions of people around the world who depended on USAID's humanitarian, health, education, governance and so many other essential programs.

None of these are separate stories, even though the air quality decision and the shutdown happened years apart and in different political climates. In each one, the power to see a danger clearly, name it honestly, and act on it in time sat inside an institution insulated from the people who'd actually bear the cost of getting it wrong, and in each one, that institution protected itself before it protected them.

And every time one of these actually broke open, it wasn't a better-run institution that did it. It was the people closest to the harm organizing themselves until they couldn't be ignored, the WTC families and unions who spent twenty years forcing recognition of illnesses the government wouldn't name, subpostmasters in the UK who found each other one at a time until a scandal buried for two decades finally cracked. And even now, those who continue to fight to bring back USAID and restart its programs globally. People whose only leverage was community and each other.

What actually works is people putting the picture together themselves, and then bearing the burden of fighting for what they're owed, because deferring to experts and politicians often drawn from the same institutions that failed in the first place has never once been the thing that fixed it. What has to exist instead is the capacity for communities to name their own needs and priorities, and the mechanisms and infrastructure that keep their voices at the center of the debates about risk in their own industries, AI included, instead of at the edge of a room where someone else decides it for them.

Every one of those examples took years, sometimes decades, of people organizing themselves and building the infrastructure to be heard before anyone in power had to listen, the WTC families building a case piece by piece, the subpostmasters finding each other one at a time. We don't have anything like that yet for AI. There's no external, independent, vendor neutral body or community built to catch what workers are actually seeing and elevate it, to speak truth to power the way those fights eventually did. That's the work in front of us now, building the coordination and the infrastructure before AI produces its own version of these failures, not scrambling to build it after.

I said it the morning after FEWS NET's finding of likely famine in Northern Gaza, the one I'd prepared to defend, was forced to be rescinded, when I was faced with a room that had just had their hard work trashed. What I told them, and what I've told other people since, is a line from Margaret Mead, and I know exactly how it sounds coming from someone who's said it out loud more than once now.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

I still believe it, as cheesy as it is, because I've watched the alternative up close and I know exactly what it costs. What it actually comes down to for me, underneath all of it, was never the systems or the frameworks or the papers with our names on them. It was the people, the families I worked on behalf of, the late night calls, the people who lost everything and kept moving forward anyway. That's the same drive that sent me overseas in the first place, and it hasn't gone anywhere. It's the same thing pulling me now, aimed in a different direction.