ST. CLOUD — About 100 people — so many that police had to put out more chairs — crowded into the St. Cloud Police Department's community room for its 9/11 remembrance event Friday evening.
Members of the audience were made up of active and retired first responders, veterans, civilians old enough to remember seeing the terrorist attacks on the news and those who were too young to have any memory of it.
"An entire generation has grown up knowing 9/11 only through the stories we tell, the photographs we share and the lessons we pass on," St. Cloud Mayor Jake Anderson said during his remarks. "In fact, more than 100 million Americans are now too young to remember that date firsthand."
The mayor said that's largely why gatherings like the one that St. Cloud hosts are so important. It's a reminder for what unity means within a community as much as it is a reminder about the 2,977 people who died that day.
"Political differences seemed smaller (after 9/11)," he said. "Regional differences faded. We were united not by what separated us, but by what connected us as Americans."
In the quarter of a century since the terrorist attacks that unitiy has faded.
"No day shall erase you from the memory of time," is written on the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum in New York.
St. Cloud Police Chief Jeffrey Oxton said this phrase has helped him remember and connect with that unity he felt 25 years ago.
"Time itself doesn't have memory; the memory comes from us," he said. "From our historians, from the way we record things, but it comes from us and how we pass on what's happened."
The firefighter tradition of ringing bells to commemorate fallen firefighters has been used across the country to honor those who fell in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks since 2001.
St. Cloud Battalion Chief Glen Koshiol rang it in three sequences of five tolls.
Other groups gave their own remembrance of those killed on 9/11.
The St. Cloud Area MetroVets gave the traditional rifle salute outside the front doors of the police department.
Members of the Waite Park-based gym Omni Training Facility, some of them wearing vests weighing up to 20 pounds to signify the gear the first responders wore, ran up and down the steps of the police department to equal the 110 stories of the world trade center — more than 2,000 individual steps.
St. Cloud Fire Chief Matt Love said humans are remarkable in their ability to mourn and remember those they never knew.
"Part of the ability to mourn the people we never met, is to make sure we have the ability to honor the people we do know," he said. "Those who continue to work, carry the torch and live the values that bonded our country together on its hardest day," he said.
This article originally appeared on St. Cloud Times: St. Cloud remembers 9/11