Pretty much anyone old enough to remember September 11, 2001, can tell you where they were when they first heard that something terrible was happening in New York.
I was sitting in a seventh-grade geography class.
Looking back now as a parent, I can't imagine what it must have been like to be a teacher that morning. Teachers were learning the news at essentially the same time as everyone else, but they also had a classroom full of children looking to them for some explanation of what was happening.
At our school, it seems like teachers took several different approaches. Some turned on televisions in their classrooms. Others wheeled in those old TVs on carts that every school seemed to have back then. Some listened to radio reports.
Our geography teacher took a different approach.
He simply told us that something had happened that morning that we would remember for the rest of our lives.
And that was about all he would tell us.
At the time, I remember being frustrated by that. Looking back, I understand it a little better. The country itself didn't yet understand what was happening, and he apparently didn't want to pass along information to a room full of seventh-graders until he knew what was true.
When the bell rang and I walked into the hallway, other students began filling in the gaps. Airplanes had hit the World Trade Center. One tower was on fire. Then both towers had been hit.
At first, many of us assumed it must have been some terrible accident.
An accident would have been horrifying enough.
The truth was much worse.
According to the official account assembled by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 that morning. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03. American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59, and United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers. The North Tower fell at 10:28.
By the end of the morning, America had changed.
Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists had hijacked four commercial airliners and turned them into weapons. In all, 2,977 innocent people were killed in New York, at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93. Among them were hundreds of firefighters, police officers and other first responders who ran toward danger while thousands of others were trying desperately to escape it.
Those numbers are important, but numbers can become strangely impersonal with time.
There were 2,977 individual people.
They had spouses expecting them home that evening. Children waiting to see Mom or Dad. Parents, brothers, sisters and friends. Some had gone to work that morning. Some had boarded an airplane for an ordinary business trip or vacation. Firefighters and police officers responded to what they thought was an emergency and found themselves in the middle of an attack on the country.
Twenty-five years later, those are the people we should remember first.
But remembering also means trying to understand what happened, and that leads to another lesson from September 11 that I think remains important today: the public needs access to information.
There are still questions surrounding 9/11, and there probably always will be. Some are legitimate questions about intelligence failures, government preparedness and what various agencies knew before the attacks. Others have developed into alternative theories that range from plausible questions worth examining to claims that have been investigated extensively and for which evidence has not been found.
For example, people often ask about World Trade Center Building 7 because no airplane struck it. That is true. The official investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that fires burning uncontrolled for hours led to a progressive structural collapse. NIST also specifically examined whether an explosion caused the building to fall and reported that it found no evidence of such a blast.
Likewise, theories have circulated for years that a missile rather than an airplane struck the Pentagon. The official record identifies American Airlines Flight 77, and the investigation included aircraft debris, eyewitness accounts and other physical evidence from the site.
That doesn't mean people should be discouraged from asking questions. Quite the opposite. Important events deserve scrutiny.
And there are genuine reasons to ask difficult questions about what happened before September 11.
The 9/11 Commission itself reported that during the spring and summer of 2001, American intelligence agencies received a stream of warnings that al-Qaeda was preparing something major. CIA Director George Tenet famously described the system as "blinking red." An Aug. 6 presidential intelligence briefing was titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US."
The Commission ultimately found serious failures in imagination, coordination and information-sharing. Pieces of information existed in different places, but they were not assembled in time to prevent the attack.
Knowing that makes access to the historical record even more important.
There are legitimate reasons for government secrecy. Active military operations cannot be broadcast to an enemy. Intelligence sources sometimes have to be protected. The identities of minor crime victims deserve protection. Certain investigative records cannot reasonably be released while an investigation is underway.
But secrecy should not become a reflex.
Eventually, the people deserve to know what their government knew, what decisions were made and why they were made. Government officials work on behalf of the public. Public records belong, in a very real sense, to the public.
We deal with this same principle on a much smaller scale as local journalists. Tennessee's Public Records Act begins with the principle that government records are open to citizens unless the law specifically provides otherwise. At the same time, the list of exceptions has grown considerably through the years, often for understandable reasons.
Every exception may have a good argument behind it. But collectively, we should always be cautious when the amount of information hidden from the public grows.
Lack of information creates a vacuum, and vacuums are quickly filled by rumor, speculation and distrust.
That is true when the subject is one of the greatest national tragedies in American history, and it is true when the subject is a controversy at the local courthouse or school.
Journalists have an important role in obtaining and explaining that information, but freedom of information isn't really a privilege for journalists. It belongs to everyone. The press simply uses that right on behalf of the public every day.
Still, I don't want questions about government transparency—or debates over what happened behind the scenes—to become the central story of September 11.
The central story is the people.
It is the office worker who never made it home.
The firefighter climbing the stairs while everyone else was coming down.
The passengers aboard Flight 93 who learned what had happened in New York and decided they would not sit quietly while their airplane was used to kill more people.
It is the families whose lives changed forever that morning.
And it is a generation of Americans who can still close their eyes and remember exactly where they were when they first heard the news.
A quarter-century has passed now. An entire generation has grown to adulthood with no personal memory of September 11 at all.
That makes our responsibility to remember even greater.
Tell your children where you were.
Tell them what happened.
Tell them about the people who died, the first responders who ran toward the buildings and the passengers who fought back.
Encourage them to learn the history and to ask questions.
Because "never forget" means more than remembering a date on the calendar.
It means preserving the truth of what happened and the memory of the people whose lives were taken that day.
Twenty-five years later, we remember.