Twenty years after 9/11 attacks, do Americans still believe in democracy?

I was an eighth grade American history teacher at Sacred Heart School in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001. Like all Americans, the details of that day are forever etched in my mind. The fear, the panic, the unknown as my students were dismissed one by one. The inability to contact my husband for hours as cellphones stopped working amid the flurry of calls to find loved ones. The devastating footage of the twin towers that we all watched over and over again.

But what is also clearly etched in my mind is the way Americans came together after Sept. 11. There was a deep sadness across the nation, but also a palpable camaraderie. We did not always agree on the policies our nation should adopt in the wake of that tragic day, but we were deeply united against an enemy that attempted to attack our very freedoms. In our collective grief, we rallied together around the ideals that have always made the United States great (“‘Muslim Americans shouldn’t have to feel and act this way’: 20 years later, reflecting on the 9/11 attacks and hate that followed,” Sept. 9).

Many of my students were first generation Americans who came to our country to escape poverty and violence unknown to me. Much like my Italian, Irish and Polish grandparents and great-grandparents — who also once sat in classrooms as first generation Americans — they understood American freedom in a way that I took for granted. My students knew corrupt elections, dictators and hunger. They knew terrorist attacks on their own land such that Sept. 11 invoked a different kind of fear in them than it did in me. They fled their homelands for a better life, as so many of our ancestors have done. They fled for new lives, new opportunities, new freedoms. And because of this, their patriotism ran deep. Our daily Pledge of Allegiance had a different meaning to my students than it did for me; they recognized the symbolism of our flag, which I naively took for granted.

I taught my students that we had fought for our freedom and founded our country as a democracy. I taught them that no one person could rule for too long in America, that we had created a balance of power. That the right to vote, to disagree, to protest, to believe, to have a free press, to have a peaceful transfer of power — that these freedoms came with America. That these they were built into our fabric. That they were not some add-on, some extraneous part of America. These freedoms were America.

I taught them these things. And I was wrong. My students knew the fragility of our democracy. I did not.

I wonder now, 20 years after 9/11, what those former students, now grown, make of our nation today. Perhaps they are as shocked as I am to read predictions of our democracy crumbling. To hear fears of corrupt elections, to watch footage of an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, to see the removal of voting rights, to hear Americans screaming at one another over masks and vaccines. To live in an America so divided that it is literally at war with itself. Perhaps, like me, they are deeply shaken by the past two years.

Or perhaps they remember too much of the countries they left, other places that had promised freedoms, only to deliver fear and violence. Countries that had pitted their citizens against one another, only to have a tyrannical leader step into a chasm. I wonder what they think now about their right to vote as Americans, about this land of opportunity and greatness. I wonder if they still believe in what I taught them about their inherent freedoms as U.S. citizens. I wonder if I still believe. I wonder if we, as a nation, still believe.