09/09/2026
Twenty-Five Years Later: Does It Always Take a Disaster?"
Twenty-five years ago this week, I remember something that had nothing to do with the buildings.
In the days after, strangers helped strangers without being asked. Lines formed around the block for blood drives. Flags went up on houses that had never flown one before. For a little while, "we are all New Yorkers" wasn't a slogan — it was just how people felt.
The wall between me and you — the one we spend most of our lives maintaining without noticing — got thin. Not gone. Thin.
And then, gradually, it wasn't thin anymore. The flags came down. We went back to our corners, as if the closeness had been a fever that broke rather than a truth we'd found.
Here's what I've come to think: that closeness wasn't something new that got created. It's always there, underneath the walls we keep between ourselves and everyone we've decided isn't "us." Fear just knocked those walls loose for a while. We didn't become more connected — we got scared together, and fear has a way of making "us" bigger, temporarily, before it recedes and lets the walls back up.
So the question I keep sitting with this anniversary is: does it always take a disaster?
Does the circle only widen under threat — forced open by tragedy, left to close once the danger passes? Or can it be chosen, on purpose, without waiting for something terrible to knock the walls down for us?
I don't have a clean answer. But we proved something twenty-five years ago — that closeness is possible, it's not hypothetical. The real question is what it would take to choose it again, deliberately, without a disaster doing it for us.
Edwin St. Aubin⚜️
