A week after watching the Towers fall from my window on 9/11, I was hired by FEMA to serve as a media liaison at ground zero. I was given a hard hat, mask, & badge - and told to head downtown.

A few thoughts on what happened next & how COVID-19 is different than 9/11. 1/x

I caught a ride down to the World Trade Center, as we got closer there were crowds well-wishers waved homemade signs thanking first responders for their service. Downtown, I helped produce & promote footage and news out of the site where media was mostly banned. 2/x

As the coronavirus ravaged New York and then the rest of the United States, similar signs and celebrations have sprouted up to thank today’s heroes, health care and essential workers. Yet, each is a trigger, transporting me back to that pick-up truck and 9/11 itself. 3/x

It's clear I’m not the only one thinking of those days in 2001. Despite the downsides of historical analogies and the differences between 9/11 and COVID-19, today’s crisis has inspired a similar sense of surprise and siege. 4/x

And, nearly every time COVID’s death toll marks another grim milestone: 9,000, 30,000, then 150,000, and now 190,000, someone uses 9/11, which killed almost 3,000 people, as a comparison. 5/x

Yet, as we acknowledge the 19th anniversary of 9/11, the analogy makes it hard to miss what’s been missing from COVID: any rallying behind a big national undertaking. In the weeks after 9/11, I and many others thought we were coming together behind a grand response. 6/x

With COVID, the United States has endured a crisis like few others in history—in its size and scale—and yet no official, let alone President Donald Trump, has called Americans to do much more than stay home. 7/x

Now, grand plans are no cure for COVID or any other calamity, indeed we've all learned since 9/11 that misadventures can make matters far worse; but what happened over the last two decades to kill American ambition and what does a more reticent America mean for the world? 8/x

Big plans are part of the nation’s DNA. What else was the Declaration of Independence? Americans’ ambition was never just about establishing a government all their own; but as Thomas Paine wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” 9/x

Ever since, Americans have tried to make the world anew again and again, and particularly in moments of crisis: after Pearl Harbor, after Sputnik, after Iraq invaded Kuwait 30 years ago. Americans have even gone to war against poverty, drugs, terrorism, and more. 10/x

As a result, Americans were prepared in the days following 9/11 for big plans. After a few faulty first steps, George W. Bush delivered in dramatic fashion: at Ground Zero, he declared into a bullhorn, “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” 11/x

As we know now, the mission to deliver that message to Al Qaeda quickly crept not just in ambition—from delivering justice to al Qaeda for the attacks to remaking Afghanistan—but also location from that country to Iraq. Bush upped he ante to ending tyranny itself in 2005. 12/x

Such mission creep is one downside to grand plans: the morning after 9/11, few would have guessed we’d be worried just four years later about the finer points of writing an Iraqi Constitution. 13/x

More than unintended consequences, America’s big plans have been contaminated by preexisting agendas—e.g Iraq—& conditions, including racism & xenophobia. Last, rarely is enough attention paid to who pays for grand plans with lives and limb or their impact on those abroad. 14/x

Regardless, when the United States has been threatened, it’s no surprise leaders have tried to redirect Americans towards a greater global project. Leaders know causes can comfort or convince Americans to continue to rally around the flag—and the president. 15/x

Yet in the six months since COVID started changing seemingly everything in the United States, there’s been no corresponding initiative. Trump’s biggest speech on the pandemic, in March, was filled with errors and promises that could never be met. 16/x

When the president finally declared a few days after that the country was going to war against COVID, he gave up the rhetorical schtick—and arguably the fight itself—before it really got going. 17/x

For a country still technically at war with both cancer & terrorism, such limited ambitions are a surprise. It would be completely within both our national character and track record for the U.S to declare a war against the coronavirus or viruses in general. 18/x

But even if Trump walked into the WH briefing room tomorrow & launched a plan to make the world safer, healthier, better or just different, Americans are unlikely to rush to his cause. 19/x

Now, there are several reasons for such reticence—besides Trump, whose self-interests are reliant on Americans believing the crisis is over. With hundreds dying each day and millions more in bed sick or terrified, it’s tough to convince anyone the country can do much more. 20/x

We’re also far more divided today then after 9/11 & previous crisis. In recent weeks, Anthony Fauci said especially compared to 9/11, “Now, there’s such a divergence of how people view this and such a divisiveness.” 21/x