America marks 25 years since 11 September as four former presidents stand at Ground Zero

The United States marked 25 years since the 11 September 2001 attacks on Friday with the annual reading of names at the National September 11 Memorial in New York, a ceremony at the Pentagon and another at the crash field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. All four living former presidents attended the Ground Zero rite. Vice President JD Vance and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani were there. President Donald Trump spoke at the Pentagon and said the country would not forget and would continue to fight. He did not attend the New York ceremony. Some relatives of the dead criticised the absence.

The attacks killed 2,977 people in New York, Arlington and Shanksville. The memorial pools sit in the footprints of the twin towers. Each year the rite is the same on purpose: names, bells, moments of silence timed to the impacts and the collapses. The 25th year drew a larger official list and a sharper argument about who stands at which site.

A Mount Sinai study released around the anniversary looked at World Trade Center responders and the neighbourhoods they later lived in. Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine reported that responders in greener neighbourhoods had lower measured risks of frailty, post-traumatic stress and depression. Higher exposure to heat and air pollution in the home area went with higher risks. The paper treats the years after 2001 as an environmental health file, not only a trauma file. That is a different sentence from the one read at the pools, and it is aimed at city planning as much as at memorial speech.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a message the same day remembering the dead and restating India's line against terrorism. The calendar placed the anniversary against the first full day of BRICS arrivals in New Delhi and against a Middle East war that has again put American forces in the Gulf. Officials will use those overlaps. The New York rite is built to resist them. It is a list of names.

Twenty-five years is long enough that a share of the crowd now includes adults who were not born in 2001. The memorial's problem, which every 11 September restates, is how to keep the list specific as the event becomes national myth. The four former presidents in one plaza was a picture of continuity. Trump at the Pentagon was a picture of a different stage. Relatives who wanted him at Ground Zero said so in public.

Trump's Pentagon remarks followed the form of wartime anniversaries: memory plus resolve. Relatives who wanted him at the pools were asking for a different form, the civic one that New York has hosted for a quarter century. Both events can be true at once. They are not the same event.

The four former presidents in Lower Manhattan gave the 25th year a group photograph that earlier anniversaries did not always manage. Mamdani's presence as mayor placed a new city administration in a rite designed before he was in office. The names on the parapets do not change with either fact. That is the point of cutting the letters in bronze.

The Mount Sinai numbers will not change the ceremony. They do change what a health department can say to the men and women who dug in the pile and then went home to hot, smoggy blocks. Green cover and heat are levers a city can still move. That is the one new measurement attached to an anniversary that otherwise repeats itself by design.

Shanksville remains the smallest of the three rites and the one least pulled into present politics. That is why families who fly there keep going back.