We still too readily confuse military action with strategy. Look at our illegal invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its President Nicolás Maduro, only to replace him with his ideological acolyte.
Fear of immigrants and Muslims remains politically useful. See the Republican Party, which considers Islamophobia as one of its main characteristics.
The architecture of surveillance and security built after 9/11 endures.
And we remain susceptible to the belief that overwhelming power can resolve fundamentally political problems. See Trump’s Iran policy failures that have neither ended its nuclear program nor toppled the regime.
Some days, I wonder whether we learned precisely the wrong lessons.
But I am hopeful about something else.
The argument over those lessons is no longer being conducted by the same narrow circle of Americans. Twenty-five years ago, Muslims entered the consciousness of many Americans in the worst possible way: through collapsing buildings and the actions of 19 men responsible for an act of almost unimaginable cruelty. America spent the years that followed debating Muslims, invading Muslim countries, surveilling Muslim communities, and demanding that we explain ourselves.
But America changed us too.
It pushed a generation of us into public and artistic life.
People who had once been spoken about began speaking for themselves.
My career began because America desperately wanted to understand the Muslim world. A quarter century later, I find myself part of a generation asking America to understand what its response to that world has revealed about itself.
September 11 changed the course of my life.
It changed the course of my country.
After 25 years spent watching wars begin, revolutions rise and fall, and ordinary people endure decisions made thousands of miles away, I no longer believe history inevitably bends toward wisdom.
America does not inevitably learn from its mistakes.
It has to be made to learn from them.
And perhaps that is where my hope resides—not in the belief that America will always choose wisely, but in the growing number of Americans with the power to challenge it when it does not.
The people telling the story have changed.
And sometimes, changing who gets to tell the story is how you begin to change the story itself.
