It is hard to remember a time that Americans were on the same side.

Except on Sept. 11.

Every year on this date, the anniversary reminds us of the grim day in 2001 when we were united by the dark and unbelievable horror of the worst terrorist attack in our history. The date is a scar that startles us each year when we glance in the mirror and see its jagged cut across our face.

We remember that after years of bitterness on both sides, in our grief and fear and uncertainty, on Sept. 11, 2001, we held hands in a death grip, wanting to believe we were all in this together. We wanted to believe that even in the face of falling towers in New York, a fiery blaze at the Pentagon and a martyrdom of heroes in Pennsylvania, we could do anything if we just did it as one nation.

But after just 24 years, we have lost the solidarity we felt when George W. Bush spoke from Ground Zero. We have abandoned any commitment we offered when the rising smoke and falling ash obscured what we were on the outside and left only who we were on the inside.

We have chosen to forget the lessons we learned about loss, about standing up and standing as one. We have chosen to fracture into not just parties but factions of parties. We have chosen to put money, power and politics ahead of not just human life but often our own best interests.

It didn’t take long for us to revert to a path of enmity that has been growing for decades. However, it seems that, in recent years, we have not just lost the ability to be a people who may disagree but still work and live together. We have lost the willingness to try to be those people at all.

That unity was our greatest strength. It steadied us as we mourned. It carried us as we rebuilt. And it signaled to the world that no enemy could destroy us from the outside.

We fight with our leaders, with our neighbors, with our friends and our families. We fight online. We fight in person. We fight with signs, with shouts and with limitless hatred poured out against those who look or think or speak differently.

And so it is no surprise that today, 24 years after airplanes struck our landscape like thunderbolts, our nation and our world are rocked by a storm of unrest.

It is important that, as an area that is born in metalworking, we remember that while fire can melt iron, what tempers steel to make it workable and strong is the way that it cools. What makes an alloy functional is the way the different metals work as one.

America does not honor the dead of Sept. 11 through fighting and distrust. The 2,976 people who died that day — and the men and women who have died since of illness acquired through rescue and recovery efforts — deserve the ultimate memorial of peace and cooperation that starts here and spreads outward like ripples on water.

We do not just owe it to those victims, those patriots and heroes. We owe it to their children and our children.

It is past time we remember what Sept. 11 should have forged. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

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