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About this time every year, the television will catch my eye. Memories come flooding back.

In recent days, documentaries — some new, many a few years old — about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States started popping up on television. I always stop and watch.

Not sure how or why the remote control leaves the hand and I watch; we know how the story ends. Yet the stories are still fascinating and educational. The people stories, those of tragedy and death, and those of survival remain heart-wrenching.

Tears begin to well up when ESPN or some other channel runs a piece on Welles Crowther, the “man in the red bandana.” Crowther was a former Boston College lacrosse player who worked in the World Trade Center. When survivors began to tell their stories in the weeks after the attack, Crowther’s family learned that young man who had carried a red handkerchief since childhood had it covering his mouth and nose as he led people out of the South Tower. He never left the building.

Among the striking images that I can close my eyes and see is one wide-eyed fireman, Mike Kehoe. going up the stairs of the North Tower. On the other side are people in business attire, suits and ties, going down the stairs. Going up. Going down.

Kehoe survived. Three hundred forty-three of his brothers didn’t.

Another iconic image we’ve all seen is of New York Police Department officer Moira Smith, the cousin of Montour County Commissioner Trevor Finn. In the photo, Smith is seen leading injured and bloodied Edward Nicholls to safety from the burning World Trade Center. Smith went back inside to bring more people to safety. Moments later, the building collapsed around her.

Smith was 38 when she died on Sept. 11, 2001.

It is easy to wonder how we would react in those moments. Would we go up the stairs, or down? I thought of that this week when a social media post popped into one of my feeds from one of my favorite shows, The West Wing.

“The true measure of a people’s strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arrive,” President Jed Bartlet says in an episode called “20 Hours in America.” In the episode, a pipe bomb explodes on a college campus, killing 44 including swimmers who responded to the tragedy. “When, after having heard the explosion from their practice facility they ran into the fire to help get people out. Ran into the fire. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight ... every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we’re reminded that that capacity may well be limitless.”

Each year on Sept. 11, we are reminded of this nation’s capacity to run into the fire. This remarkable sense of selflessness is not uniquely American, but the rugged individualism that has buoyed the country for nearly two and a half centuries and leads to a collective response when one is needed.

I would argue a collective response is needed now. One is needed to restore bursting seams of civility and demagoguery. Unfortunately, the seeds of division are sewn by leaders, people we rely on to create unity and do what’s best for the country as we saw on Sept. 12, 2001.

We need people to run into the fire and extinguish these embers.

Email comments to bbowman@dailyitem.com.

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