Six days after 9/11, with grief and anger running high across the country, President Bush traveled to a mosque in Washington, D.C. and delivered a short, carefully worded speech: the attackers didn't represent true Islam; the men standing here grieve and are as outraged as you are; American Muslims deserve respect and safety; and the country needed to hold itself to its own values in a moment of pain.

That was, in most ways, a reasonable and decent message. But look at the timing and the audience. Within a week of the worst attack on American soil in generations, the most widely quoted presidential remarks on the subject were reassurances aimed at the community associated with the attackers — not a message primarily addressed to the families who were still identifying remains. And the men on either side of the President were members of the Muslim Brotherhood and did emphatically approve of the “magnificent nineteen” who brought down the Twin Towers.

This day isn't about attacking that instinct to avoid backlash. It's about naming a pattern: in moment after moment like this one, over the following twenty-five years, the public comfort of the group associated with an attack has repeatedly taken priority, in tone and airtime, over the grief of the people who suffered the attack.

As an exercise, this day invites readers to write the speech they think the POTUS should have been given instead.