American here:

The only real long-term impacts it had on us can be summed up in two bullet points:

• normalizing overt, obnoxious patriotism, which absolutely served as a gateway drug to nationalism for huge swaths of the country
• establishing, normalizing, and entrenching surveillance + police state apparatuses in the US

That’s it.

“Never forget” is consummate bullshit for the vast majority of the country. I know this because the number of people who were immediately killed on 9/11 was just under 3000… and there was a period of several weeks during early COVID where we beat that death toll daily. And the response from huge swaths of the country was to go online and troll the “woke liberal elites” in urban areas that were being ravaged by the pandemic.

Nobody here cares about people dying. Only optics.