Twenty-five years ago, 2,977 people were killed in the September 11 attacks — people from more than 90 nations, in New York, at the Pentagon, and aboard Flight 93. Today marks that anniversary. This reel begins where any honest memorial must: with the dead, remembered and mourned as loved ones, not abstractions.

But it does not stop there. The reel insists that honoring them “today, 25 years later” means thinking hard not only about that day, but about the days that went before it, the days that followed it, and today itself. That refusal to isolate 9/11 is the reel’s structural choice, made visible in its repetition: bloodshed, bloodshed, bloodshed, and more bloodshed — from ages past, to that day, to its aftermath, to this day. The repetition is not decoration. It is the reel’s argument that 9/11 cannot be honestly mourned as a sealed-off tragedy, severed from what came before and what has followed since.

In the reel’s sense, the root cause lies deeper: in the long history, from ages past, of oppression, bloodshed, and theft that generates domination, grievance, retaliation, and further bloodshed. That history helps identify patterns and structures that must be dismantled; it neither justifies 9/11 nor diminishes al-Qaeda’s full responsibility for choosing to murder civilians.

Nor was what followed bloodless. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates more than 900,000 deaths from direct war violence and over 38 million displaced across the post-9/11 war zones it tracks. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 investigation found the CIA’s detention and interrogation program was far more brutal than represented to Congress and the public. That cycle continues today, with governments, militaries, terrorist organizations, militias, and other armed actors still killing, dispossessing, and terrorizing civilians. No side earns an exemption from the standard because it was wronged first.

From that temporal sweep comes the reel’s moral claim, stated as a turn rather than an aside: we do not honor the dead by continuing to support and enable democratic erosion, authoritarian consolidation, oppression, massacre, and theft — domestically and abroad. The claim is that memorial and complicity cannot coexist. A nation cannot mourn innocent blood on one day while enabling the conditions that produce more of it the rest of the year and call that honoring the dead.

#ReverseTheCurse is all-sided — no government, nation, movement, or armed group is exempt from the standard, and prior victimization never confers permission to become an oppressor. But for this reel, an American appeal to that standard begins with the conduct Americans can most directly change: reversing the curse starts at home, then moves outward and forward to all nations.

That claim is why the reel does not end in silence. It ends, twice, in resolution and action — because for this reel, remembrance that does not produce conduct is incomplete.

The action it calls for is specific: getting the country out of the peril it has walked into, reversing what has gone wrong, dismantling systems and structures of oppression, violence, murder, and theft, and doing so through the lawful mechanisms available to the people.

That means stopping efforts to manipulate the electoral playing field and protecting electoral integrity, electing people who will remove Trump and MAGA-aligned power through lawful, constitutional means, and specifically pursuing the impeachment of Donald Trump and his conviction by the Senate — treated here not as the whole of reconstruction, but as the first domestic step against what the reel identifies as an active accelerator of the country’s democratic erosion. Beyond that first domestic step, it calls for reconstructing the country for real, and for the broader work of liberating, healing, and blessing all humanity.

Twenty-five years is long enough to demand that memorial mean something beyond a single day of silence. This reel’s answer is that it must mean clear sight about the full stretch of bloodshed 9/11 sits inside, followed by the will to act — lawfully, but unrelentingly — on what that sight demands.

#GetUSAoutOfPeril

#ReverseTheCurse

#EndRepugnantPlague

#StopTheRig

#ElectConsequences

#ImpeachConvictTrump

#ReconstructUSAforReal

#FreeHealBlessAllHumanity

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Holy Spirit of Emperor–Rescuer Jesus Messiah, be merciful to us and help us.

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Sources

• Casualty figures (2,977 dead, more than 90 nations): National September 11 Memorial & Museum

• Post-9/11 wars (900,000+ deaths from direct war violence; 38 million+ displaced): Brown University Costs of War Project

• CIA interrogation program findings: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 2014 report

• U.S. democratic erosion: Freedom House 2026 report (score 84→81); V-Dem 2026 report (24% one-year decline in Liberal Democracy Index)

• Trump administration mail-ballot rule blocked from taking effect for the 2026 midterms: First Circuit Court of Appeals, League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump

• Mid-decade redistricting for partisan advantage: Reuters reporting on Texas’ 2025 congressional redraw, designed to favor Republicans and potentially shift up to five House seats

• Impeachment/conviction mechanism: U.S. Senate, Constitution Article I

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Glem Melo is an imperfect but repentant evangelical missionary.

With research and composition assistance from AI tools.