Another message of hatred has been sent in America.

I f you lived through it, you’ll never forget it, and you’ll always look on this date on the calendar with some mix of dread, grief, anger, maybe a bit of pride, and questions of why it had to happen the way it did. Your memories are probably still as clear as if the attacks had happened yesterday. The 9/11 attacks may keep getting further into the past, but they don’t feel like distant history, and maybe they never will if you lived through it.

If you lived through it, not every American has your memories of that day. Approximately 30 percent of Americans today were not alive on September 11, 2001, so you figure about a third or so of Americans have no memory of that day. We’ll need to keep telling the younger generations about that day — what we saw, what we heard, what we felt — the terror in our hearts of witnessing so many killed in an instant, and wondering where our loved ones were at that moment. The relief of finding friends and family who were okay. The deep, encompassing grief that so many people didn’t get that relief. The sense that the world had suddenly changed, irrevocably, for the worse.

But today’s young people will never feel the events the way we did that day and in the aftermath. That’s a blessing, in a way.

Osama bin Laden sleeps with the fishes, but his hosts, the Taliban, are still running Afghanistan after a two-decade hiatus. They’re as brutal and cruel and dumb as ever, barring female aid workers in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. As disgracefully mismanaged as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was, the news cycle and Americans’ attention moved on. It’s understandable that many Americans would be happy to never hear or see the word “Afghanistan” again.

As misfortune would have it, a day short of the 24th anniversary of the attacks, America once again witnessed a sudden and unjustifiable act of horrific violence, driven by some sort of twisted, hateful ideology. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — just 31 years old, married father of two — is not on the same scale as the 9/11 attacks, but there are some common threads.

Someone out there really hated Kirk just for existing.

Kirk wasn’t the president, or a candidate, or some officeholder. He was just an American who had strong beliefs and felt the call to defend them, boldly and proudly, in as many venues as possible. In a country with the First Amendment, speaking your mind and standing up for what you think is right isn’t supposed to be a death sentence, and it certainly isn’t supposed to lead to you getting shot and murdered, right in front of your own daughter and hundreds of people watching. But that’s where we are now.

The 24th anniversary was always going to be a day when our hearts felt heavy. But this morning it feels even worse, in light of the horrific assassination in Utah. Back then, we learned that they, over there, hated us, hating us enough to want to murder us, because what we believed didn’t line up with what they believed. Now we know some people right over here hate us, too.