Dear America: Live Like It's 9/12

On September 12th, 2001, something happened that had not happened in a long time and has not happened since: Americans looked at each other and saw Americans. Not Democrats or Republicans. Not different races or religions or backgrounds. Just Americans who had been attacked and who were going to face what came next together. Nearly every store in the country sold out of flags. U.S. Army veteran and conservative media personality Graham Allen believes that day holds a lesson the country desperately needs to hear right now. In Dear America, he makes the case that the unity of 9/12 was not an aberration, it was a revelation of who Americans actually are beneath the layers of manufactured division that politicians, media figures, and ideologues have spent the intervening years carefully constructing. The COVID pandemic, the racial reckoning, the culture war: all of it has been designed, Allen argues, to make Americans forget what they have in common. His call to action is simple: remember 9/12. Not as a trauma to revisit but as a standard to return to. We do not have to agree on everything. We do not have to be the same. But we share a history, a set of values, and a country, and that is more than enough to build on.