Politics & Power Quote by Bob Taft

Memory is doing political work here, and it does it with a velvet glove. Taft turns Flight 93 into a civic parable: ordinary people, no uniforms, no command structure, choosing confrontation over submission. The intent is commemorative, but also clarifying - fixing the meaning of that day around agency rather than victimhood. “We will never forget” isn’t just a promise; it’s a demand that public attention remain organized around a particular moral lesson.

The line “defeating another planned attack on America” subtly widens the stakes. It moves the story from private loss to national deliverance, making the passengers’ decision feel like a battlefield outcome. That framing helps fold 9/11 into a narrative of resistance and victory, not only tragedy. It also narrows ambiguity: whatever debates swirl around policy responses, the passengers’ actions are presented as pure, legible virtue.

Calling them “the heroes for our times” is a carefully contemporary move. It implies a new model of heroism suited to an age of asymmetrical threats: courage without certainty, sacrifice without spectacle. In the early post-9/11 political climate - when leaders needed unity, purpose, and moral clarity - this kind of language functioned like adhesive. It binds grief to resolve, and resolve to national identity.

The subtext is that citizenship itself is a form of readiness. You don’t have to be enlisted to be enlisted.