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Home – Patriotism News – We’ve Forgotten What the Days After 9/11 Were Like 

We’ve Forgotten What the Days After 9/11 Were Like 

Gen. Keith Kellogg | Chad Wolf

Twenty-five years ago this month, the country we love did something it rarely does: It stopped arguing with itself. For a few weeks after the Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001, there was no red America or blue America. There was just America, standing in line to give blood, enlisting in numbers recruiters hadn’t seen since Vietnam, hanging flags off overpasses in towns that had never flown one.

A generation of young men and women who had never set foot on a battlefield signed up to fight a war on the other side of the world because they understood, without needing it explained to them, what it meant to be an American. That instinct, service before self, nation before party, is part of the legacy of 9/11. It is also what we appear to have lost over the last quarter century.   

A stranger reality has dawned on Americans on this anniversary: Not only have we lost the sense of what it means to be American, but we are once again faced with a new wave of radical anti-Americanism—one that is popular among the most educated and seemingly assimilated of our youth. Some of our traditional European allies are bastions of anti-American Islamist sympathy, while our Middle East partners appear most aligned with us on the threat from Islamism and other anti-American ideologies.   

We face a crisis over the very definition of assimilation. Just as we expect new citizens to understand and embrace what it means to be American, we must at the same time focus on familiarizing those born........

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