Here’s how Chris Cuomo opened his show on CNN:

“I often wonder if people who are living during times that will be historic know it. Because we sure are. Do you realize that? Do you realize that people will be talking about this period in American history for decades and decades to come?”

Eugene Robinson: “T.S. Eliot wrote that the world ends ‘not with a bang but a whimper,’ but I fear our great nation is careening toward a third manner of demise: descent into lip-blubbering, self-destructive idiocy.”

“How did we become, in such alarming measure, so dumb? Why is the news dominated by ridiculous controversies that should not be controversial at all? When did so many of our fellow citizens become full-blown nihilists who deny even the concept of objective reality? And how must this look to the rest of the world?”

“The Columbus Day sale — a longtime ritual for car dealers and department stores — is dead,” Axios reports.

“Retailers are moving away from big sales events in general, and are especially eager to to distance themselves from this particularly disputatious federal holiday.”

David Leonhardt: “In 1777, smallpox was a big enough problem for the bedraggled American army that George Washington thought it could jeopardize the Revolution. An outbreak had already led to one American defeat, at the Battle of Quebec. To prevent more, Washington ordered immunizations — done quietly, so the British would not hear how many Americans were sick — for all troops who had not yet had the virus.”

“It worked. The number of smallpox cases plummeted, and Washington’s army survived a war of attrition against the world’s most powerful country. The immunization mandate, as Ron Chernow wrote in his 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Washington, ‘was as important as any military measure Washington adopted during the war.'”

“A U.S. judge will grant the unconditional release of John W. Hinckley Jr. effective in June 2022, 41 years after he shot President Ronald Reagan and three others outside a D.C. hotel,” the Washington Post reports.

“Outrage over Hinckley’s acquittal in the March 30, 1981 shooting reshaped the insanity defense in courts across the country. The revelation that he had pulled the trigger to impress movie star Jodie Foster added obsession and celebrity to the case. And extraordinary television footage of the attack on the 40th U.S. president brought the event to millions of American homes.”

I was outside on the roof of a 50-story office building in midtown Manhattan looking downtown at the two World Trade Center towers on fire when the first one collapsed. It was terrifying — with the fear only compounded by being outside on the roof of a skyscraper.

The scramble to get back inside is still a blur. But once off the roof we were faced with a decision to exit the building: Should we take the elevator or the stairs? I was worried the power might go out and ran down 50 flights of stairs as fast as I could. That still seems like a sensible decision.

Once on the street, I headed north. The streets of Manhattan were filling with traffic and cell phones didn’t work. We didn’t really know what had happened. There was talk of a bomb going off at the base of the Twin Towers but mostly everyone was fleeing north.

But when I reached Central Park, I was faced with a dilemma. Should I walk through the park or around the edge of it? It seemed like the most important decision in the world. I chose to walk around the park but all these years later I still don’t understand why it mattered at the time.

Walter Shapiro: “On the 20th anniversary of the worst single day in American life since Pearl Harbor, I long to see the flags flying everywhere again.”

“I long for an outpouring of unity as Americans — whatever their political persuasion, whatever the spot on the map they call home — come together to tame the pandemic.”

“For me, part of the sadness of this Sept. 11 will flow from the fear that never again in my lifetime will Americans put aside their differences to battle a common foe.”

Pew Research: “The enduring power of the Sept. 11 attacks is clear: An overwhelming share of Americans who are old enough to recall the day remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. Yet an ever-growing number of Americans have no personal memory of that day, either because they were too young or not yet born.”

“A review of U.S. public opinion in the two decades since 9/11 reveals how a badly shaken nation came together, briefly, in a spirit of sadness and patriotism; how the public initially rallied behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, though support waned over time; and how Americans viewed the threat of terrorism at home and the steps the government took to combat it.”

Workers removing the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond yesterday were expecting to find a time capsule from 1887 buried at its base, the Washington Post reports.

“According to reports from the period… the capsule was crammed with 60 items. Most of it was Confederate memorabilia, Lee family history and the like. But Brumfield discovered one intriguing item on the list: a picture said to show President Abraham Lincoln in his coffin. If it’s in there, and if it survives, that would be a tremendous find, he said — one of only a handful known to exist.”

Philip Bump: “There are very few people born in the United States who are responsible for as many American deaths in combat and who played larger roles in the near-dissolution of the country than Robert E. Lee. This remains true despite decades of effort to whitewash his legacy, to cast the Civil War as a dispute not about slavery but about state sovereignty and despite efforts to insist that Lee only grudgingly joined that effort.”

“Former president Donald Trump appears not to be familiar with this reality.”

Garret Graff: “As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, I cannot escape this sad conclusion: The United States—as both a government and a nation—got nearly everything about our response wrong, on the big issues and the little ones.”

“The GWOT yielded two crucial triumphs: The core al-Qaeda group never again attacked the American homeland, and bin Laden, its leader, was hunted down and killed in a stunningly successful secret mission a decade after the attacks. But the U.S. defined its goals far more expansively, and by almost any other measure, the War on Terror has weakened the nation—leaving Americans more afraid, less free, more morally compromised, and more alone in the world.”

“A day that initially created an unparalleled sense of unity among Americans has become the backdrop for ever-widening political polarization.”

“A towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, will be taken down on Wednesday as a symbol of racial injustice, more than 130 years after it was erected in tribute to the South’s Civil War leader,” the AP reports.

“While many other Confederate symbols across the South have been removed without public announcements beforehand to avoid unruly crowds, Gov. Ralph Northam’s office is expecting a multitude and plans to livestream the event on social media.”

Mike Gerson: “The United States now enters a high-stakes race between its over-the-horizon technologies and the talent of terrorists. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, may be right that ‘the relevant terrorist groups in Afghanistan do not possess advanced external plotting capabilities.’ But in that country, al-Qaeda is not a parasite feeding off the Taliban; it is an integral part of the regime. The United States’ capitulation to the Taliban is sure to encourage a new generation of young, bright and ambitious mass murderers. And when a terrorist group is hosted by a nation, capacities may be quickly gained.”

“As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, unlearning its lessons would be a dangerous way to honor it.”

Ross Douthat: “A set of moods that flourished after 9/11: a mix of cable-news-encouraged overconfidence in American military capacities, naïve World War II nostalgia and crusading humanitarianism in its liberal and neoconservative forms. Like most Americans, I shared in those moods once; after so many years of failure, I cannot imagine indulging in them now. But it’s clear from the past few weeks that they retain an intense subterranean appeal in the American elite, waiting only for the right circumstances to resurface.”