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The weekend before September 11, 2001, I was at the World Trade Center, enjoying New York before starting my sophomore year of college in central New Jersey. A few days later, I was asleep in my dorm room when my older brother called and told me to quickly wake up and turn on the news. A plane had struck the North Tower. Twenty-five years later, I still hold the people who died that day, their families, and everyone who continues to mourn with deep tenderness. Too many were folk I knew, and all of them were folk who deserved more than that day offered them. It is possible a part of all of us died that day. In the hours, weeks, and years that followed, folk raised the American flag in front of their homes and on their cars. Folk made their way to Ground Zero in homage. We built a memorial and a museum, alongside commercial properties, and convened a commission to investigate what happened that day. These decades later, I remain curious about what we chose to do with our grief, and what the memorial we eventually built to September 11 asks of us. We spent billions constructing a place to remember those we lost, yet have never made a commensurate national investment in memorializing the millions killed and displaced through the Middle Passage, or the Native people who endured attempted genocide as this nation was formed and expanded. The disparity is not merely about monuments. It is about the divine witness we have and have not demonstrated as a people, the histories we codify, the stories we hold sacred, and the futures those stories make possible. What does our remembrance require of us? Take a breath here with me. There is more. The days after 9/11, we were told to wake up to terrorism, to threats real and imagined. And yet we also needed to wake up to our own harmful systems, the machinery of white Christian nationalism, militarism, unchecked capitalism, and concentrated power that have created pathways to destruction here and abroad. We followed the money, and in many ways we followed it toward war rather than peace and healing, toward punishment rather than repair, toward barriers rather than bridges. Grief has a way of moving from the public into the private, and I think about my brother, too. We were not particularly close even then. Two years before the attacks, he lost his partner and their business to an arson fire, and in the years that followed he struggled with drug use, encountered the criminal legal system, and endured strokes, heart attacks, and other profound health crises, until his death three years ago. By the time I understood how much help he needed, it was too late. I still wonder what I might have seen sooner, what I might have asked, whether any intervention could have reached him in time. His suffering was not his alone. And in this political and social environment we find ourselves in today, neither is ours. Today, perhaps that is the deeper wake-up call. We need more than a deep breath. We need the courage to tell the truth about what is making us sick, to hold one another with tenderness, and to hold ourselves accountable for what we do next. Casey Gerald’s The Great Refusal offers a provocative invitation: perhaps some of what we have been taught to preserve must be allowed to die. Not people, but a way of living organized around domination, extraction, fear, and disposability. As our SojoAction team gathers next week for A Seat Among Seers, our salon during the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference, we are bringing together leaders of faith and vision to sit with these questions through Casey’s work: What might it look like to hospice this way of living while cultivating the relationships, imagination, and organized power necessary to birth something better? The work is already underway. Across communities, people are building bridges, ushering in liberation, tending to one another, refusing despair, and practicing forms of joy that authoritarianism cannot decode. Birth is messy. There is pain in it, and waiting, and no guarantee of the hour. But on the other end of it is life. I think back to that weekend before, standing in the shadow of towers that no longer stand. I could not have known what was coming. None of us could. Twenty-five years after the wake-up call, I still don't know exactly what's coming next. But I know what I am choosing to labor toward. I hope you'll breathe deep and choose it with me. –– Bryan Epps, Sojourners
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