Twenty-five years is a long time. Long enough for children who were not yet born on September 11, 2001, to have grown up, started careers, married, and begun raising children of their own. Long enough for much of what followed that day to have passed from current events into history books. And long enough, unfortunately, for memory to begin to fade.

For millions of Americans who lived through September 11, it is difficult to imagine forgetting. We remember an ordinary Tuesday morning becoming something else. We remember turning on televisions and trying to understand what we were seeing. We remember the second plane striking the South Tower and the terrible realization that this was no accident. We remember the Pentagon burning, a field in Pennsylvania, and people standing in streets looking toward a skyline that would never look the same again. For those who were there, September 11 does not feel entirely like history. But increasingly, it is.

An entire generation has now reached adulthood with no personal memory of that morning. For them, September 11 can only be encountered secondhand—through classrooms, photographs, recordings, documentaries, memorials, and the recollections of people old enough to remember. There is nothing wrong with that; it is the natural passage of time. What should concern us is what happens when the passage of time becomes the loss of understanding.

History does not preserve itself. When we stop teaching it, talking about it, and passing it down, events that once seemed impossible to forget can gradually become abstractions. Context disappears, human beings become statistics, complex histories are compressed into slogans, and eventually people can inherit opinions about events they were never adequately taught to understand.

We are already far enough removed from September 11 to encounter young Americans who know remarkably little about what happened that day. More troubling still is encountering the idea that the people who died somehow represented a country that “had it coming”—as though office workers sitting at their desks, passengers aboard commercial aircraft, firefighters climbing stairwells, restaurant employees beginning their shifts, or people simply going about an ordinary Tuesday morning were legitimate targets for grievances against American foreign policy. They were not.

One can debate American foreign policy before and after September 11. Americans have done so vigorously for twenty-five years, and they should continue to do so. We can examine our government’s decisions critically, study the wars that followed, question policies adopted in the name of national security, and argue about America’s role in the world. But none of that requires moral confusion about what happened on September 11, 2001. Deliberately murdering civilians is not made righteous by a political grievance, and the humanity of the innocent does not depend upon whether someone approves of the government under which they happen to live.

That distinction matters because September 11 was not an abstraction. People went to work that morning and never came home. Passengers boarded flights expecting to arrive somewhere else a few hours later. Families said ordinary goodbyes without knowing they were final ones. First responders entered burning buildings because strangers needed them. On Flight 93, passengers and crew confronted the reality of what was happening and acted, knowing what it could cost them.

Then came everything afterward. A generation of Americans volunteered for military service. Families endured deployments, separation, injury, and loss. First responders and recovery workers remained at Ground Zero long after the cameras moved elsewhere, with some suffering illnesses years later. Americans argued about war, security, liberty, foreign policy, and what kind of country we wanted to be in a world that suddenly seemed very different. Those arguments belong to history too, and we should not sanitize them. But neither should disagreement over what followed September 11 obscure what happened on September 11.

That morning, innocent people were deliberately attacked and killed. Others displayed astonishing courage trying to save them. Families were changed forever, and a nation watched events unfold that would shape the next quarter century of its history. Perhaps this is why Never Forget must mean something different after twenty-five years. For those who remember September 11 firsthand, remembering may once have seemed automatic. We could not imagine forgetting. Now we have reached the point where remembrance requires intention.

It means telling the story to people who were not there. It means preserving the photographs and recordings, but also the individual stories behind them. It means teaching young Americans not simply that something called “9/11” happened, but what happened, who experienced it, why it mattered, and what followed. And it means resisting the temptation to turn human tragedy into an ideological abstraction, whether from the left, the right, or anywhere else.

Someday, no living person will be able to say, “I remember where I was that morning.” That is what time does. What happens to the memory after that is up to us.

Today, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, Visionary Consulting Partners remembers those whose lives were taken, those who ran toward danger to save others, those who served in the years that followed, and the families who have carried their absence and sacrifice ever since. Twenty-five years have passed, but the responsibility to remember has not.

We remember. And we will teach those who don’t.