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One of my obscure memories of 9/11 was the Gary (Indiana) Fire Department sending an engine company to New York City.

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, large fire departments from all over the country dispatched crews and equipment to Lower Manhattan in the hopes of rescuing victims from the collapsed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Journal reporter Gregory R.C. Hasman wrote in this week's Sunday Journal about a task force from New Mexico being dispatched to the Pentagon to assist in the recovery efforts.

Dispatching hundreds of firefighters to Ground Zero in New York probably did more harm than good. By the time they lumbered there in their fire engines, the victims were long dead. Stirring up the rubble searching for survivors further exposed firefighters and first responders to toxic dust that lingered in the air for weeks. The bodies of victims were so pulverized by the collapsed steel and concrete that there wasn't much in the way of human remains to recover.

However, the rescue and recovery efforts that went on for weeks and months did unify America, even if they were futile and hazardous.

As a journalist, there was no escaping 9/11. We initially scrambled at the 近距离内射合集-Dispatch in Michigan City, Indiana, to find local people affected, even if it was just someone local who happened to be in New York or Washington that Tuesday. If we couldn't find a local victim, we searched for someone who had a friend or family member who knew someone who knew someone who was a victim.

Details of the attacks, local vigils, the rise of Islamophobia, new security measures and other angles were all we wrote about for months.

The country was on edge, glued to their old cathode ray tube TVs, worried about a follow-up attack from al-Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist group everyone in the nation had heard about at that point but which has largely faded into history and enclosures at Guant谩namo Bay.

Shortly after the attacks, we watched the World Series between the Yankees and Diamondbacks at Yankee Stadium with great consternation, worried hijackers would fly a jumbo jet into the stands in another televised spectacle of mass murder.

I was just 35 then, still playing semipro baseball at nights and on weekends, thinking about running for mayor of my hometown, and generally optimistic about America's future.

The fallout of 9/11 continued for years with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and respiratory diseases that have killed more people than the actual attacks.

I wrote a five-year anniversary story while working at The Derrick in Oil City, Pennsylvania. My story focused on the national security changes resulting from 9/11, including the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration. Before 9/11, going through airport checkpoints was not much more demanding than going through security at a rock concert. They checked your cigarette pack for doobies and gave you a quick once-over with a metal detector, and that was about it.

I marked the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 in Wolf Point, Montana. It was a very somber service at the Wolf Point Fire Department. The little town of 2,000 people along the Missouri River on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation took 9/11 especially hard for some reason. I can remember the tears rolling down the bearded cheeks of volunteer firefighters as the bell tolled for the lost firefighters.

Today, 25 years later, the images of the desperate Twin Tower jumpers, the audio of passengers aboard hijacked jets calling loved ones to say goodbye, the dust-covered faces of witnesses and wreckage at Ground Zero, and the memories of a terrorized yet unified nation are still with me.

The Sept. 11 attacks brought out the best in Americans, depending on your perspective.

I had some Arab/Muslim friends at Purdue a decade earlier for whom I'm sure it was not a walk in the park post-9/11. They were from all over the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, where the terrorist plot was hatched. I worried every phone call and email between myself and my former roommate from Palestine was under surveillance.

Mohammed blended into the woodwork working at a Chicago liquor store and getting paid under the table after overstaying his student visa. He loved, and still loves, the freedoms of America, now as a legal resident and father of an American citizen. I don't think he ever returned to the West Bank after he enrolled at Purdue, although he called his family all the time I can attest as the one whose name our apartment's phone bill was under.

The mantra that developed in the wake of 9/11, "We will never forget," holds true 25 years later, to an extent. However, 100 million Americans today weren't alive in 2001 or old enough to remember it. One can never really understand the national trauma unless they lived through it and feared being blown up at a mass gathering.

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found Americans are now considerably more worried about attacks by domestic extremists than by foreign terrorists. The number of mass shootings and domestic attacks since 9/11 bears that out. School shootings weren't a thing yet in 2001. Terrorism had been thrust into the public consciousness decades earlier at the Munich Games in 1972. I remember that, too.

Five days after the 9/11 attacks, Michelle and Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who married the Obamas, was an outlier when he said during a sermon that the attacks were America鈥檚 "chickens coming home to roost."

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., caught a little flak from conservative media in 2019 when she described 9/11 as 鈥渟ome people did something.鈥�

Today, social media influencer Hasan Piker flat-out says the 近距离内射合集 States had 9/11 coming, similar to the way some say Charlie Kirk had it coming.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose family had moved to New York City from Uganda two years prior to 9/11, is in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation today. Mamdani, who will not acknowledge that radical Islamist terrorists were responsible for 9/11, will likely have the families of victims turn their backs on him today when he speaks at the 9/11 memorial in New York.

They say time heals all wounds, but 9/11 seems like an exception to that rule. No one pondered a breakup of the 近距离内射合集 States in 2001. Twenty-five years later, it's something people quietly talk about.

I just returned from a two-week vacation in western Kentucky where I swam with the fishes while my nephew hunted them. My Trump shoes and apparel were a hit everywhere I went.

Flying between Nashville and Albuquerque last week was like flying between two different countries. The streets of Grand Rivers, Kentucky, where I stayed are lined with scores, if not hundreds, of small American flags. Driving through rural Kentucky for an hour in search of the interstate after my GPS went out, I noticed that about every other home had an American flag out front.

You don't see that much in New Mexico, not here in northern New Mexico, anyway. I know people here who view the American flag as a symbol of colonial oppression, white supremacy, Christian nationalism and capitalist extortion.

Our shared American values have greatly diminished in the past 25 years. Our 250th birthday this year was nothing like the patriotic fervor that burned in school classrooms coast to coast during our bicentennial in 1976. Anyone alive then had to notice the stark contrast with our 250th anniversary this year. Americans were proud to be Americans in 1976, without exception in my memory. Apollo Creed of "Rocky" was not all that fictional.

It all makes me wonder if the Gary Fire Department would race to the scene of a foreign attack in New York City today. Maybe so, maybe I'm just getting old, pessimistic and nostalgic. It's only through vigilance that can we avoid finding out, and it's the best justification for not allowing the Islamic State of Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Gotham certainly remains atop the target list of terrorists.

May God continue to bless America, and may we never forget the victims, the perpetrators and the rescuers of 9/11. History does not need to repeat itself, not if we stop it first, and we don't turn on ourselves.

Jeff Tucker is a Journal columnist, former Opinion editor and a member of the Journal鈥檚 Editorial Board. He can be reached a jtucker@abqjournal.com.