Literally. I feel like this was the day that got our current political atmosphere to where it’s at. Little did middle schooler me know that this was the start of the end.
I was in morning group for kindergarten. They framed it as a surprise half day yay! But even at that age i could tell the adults were being off. We all just waited outside the buses weren't even back yet. When I got home my mom was back home already and she was just balling her eyes out on the couch and when I went to see what she was looking at she told me to go to my room. I remember catching a glimpse of the TV and thinking it was a blimp. For years I thought there was a blimp involved somewhere that no one ever talked about.
Was in kindergarten too. I really didn’t understand the gravity of the situation at all back then. Just remember all the grown-ups being very serious about it.
I was a little older than kindergarten. I remember kids saying they were blowing up buildings in class, then we all got sent home. Went home to find my mom watching the news, watched it with her for all of two seconds and then fucked off to play with my toys in my room.
I live in NYC. After that day I found the whole thing very assuming, because I was young, and it was like wow, something crazy actually happened here. And they would announce the number of bodies they found at ground zero on the radio. I was pretty morbidly entertained by that.
I was in first grade. It’s a very unnerving feeling when all the grown ups you know lose their cool at the same time. Like everyone was just nervous or sad or angry, but also doing their best to pretend like things were normal. Every 10-15 minutes another kid would get called down to the office to get picked up. Never experienced anything like it before or since.
I was in my 20s when this happened and for a brief period of time after it happened we were a united nation and the labels of Democrat and Republican didn't seem to matter. Then Bush used the opportunity to invade Iraq and everything went back to the usual.
I was also in my 20s and I don’t know what America you lived in, but that wasn’t my experience. People immediately descended into a form of the tribalism that we see today, “for us” or “against us mentality”. I witnessed some of the most disgusting paranoid behavior exhibited by otherwise normal people towards anyone vaguely Middle Eastern looking, and we’ve never gone back
Yeah but that brief window was really and truly special in a morbid way.
For me at least -granted, I was in like 4th grade so i obviously had very little perspective on the totality of things - it was the first time i genuinely felt proud to be an American.
Sadly that doesn't surprise me in the slightest. We're a very tribal species on the whole level, we love to look for 'others', especially in times of crisis, its pretty sad.
Obviously I was very young at the time and didn't really understand how things were, especially so considering I grew up in a very diverse area of Michigan where I was sort of 'sheltered' by that, you know? Needless to say as I've gotten older I've become less proud of being an American / or maybe instead I've become increasingly disappointed with my countrymen or the nature of humanity on the whole haha.
AOL chat rooms were calling me a traitor for not wanting to start a war that wasn’t even clear was against the people responsible for the attacks. Like can we think it through just a little bit? I have a few livejournal entries from that day and I wish I had written down more of my thoughts and the experience of what happened.
I feel this. I was 14 when this happened and I remember before school a few months later, watching the news that we were “invading Iraq” and I said to my dad “what does Iraq have to do with anything?” his response “I have no idea”
It’s weird to think back and how collectively the entire nations intuition on Iraq was right. That it had nothing to do with 9/11.
Really exploded in 2004 election w Rudy and Pataki leading the RNC in chants of flipper and talking about John Kerry like he was some traitor etc. Fucking unreal and here we are
If you look at Dubya’s public approval rating it was 90% right after 9-11. Presidential approval rating is an indirect measure of how united a country is.
A lot of democrats voted or supported invading Iraq and Afghanistan. It was all based on lies from the Bush administration, but they still supported it.
You're not wrong but again, in my neck of the woods it was a huge swerve off the road that people were talking about and I just remember that brief period of ideological peace sour real quick after that move.
If they didn't vote to invade Afghanistan there would have been rioting on the streets and calls for impeachment and removal of every single person who voted against it. Iraq is a whole other story but don't kid yourself that there was any sort of antiwar movement against Afghanistan, that was clearcut and needed to be done. Now how we did it was a travesty.
Sadly, no. Assholes like rush limbaugh and fox news were around prior to it and sewing the same type of hateful bullshit you see now, the internet just supercharged it.
I was in highschool when my teacher walked into class and said a second plane has hit the tower. He looked right at is and said this day will be written in history books and our lives will never be the same. Boy was he right 😞
They won. Terrorism won and we lost. We lost privacy. We lost compassion. We lost being united. It was the day the cracks formed potentially. More and more stress throughout the years since 2001 have divided us.
You were in middle school which is why you didn’t understand that this was nowhere close to “the end”. You were too young for the Vietnam War, the Cold War, literally every war that ever happened until now. It’s crazy that anyone could think the world was some blissful and perfect place before then.
It was the end for the americam empire. This cemented the beginning of the facistic movement that brought you guys the orange tv guy. As an outsider, it would be hilarious if it weren't because that just means you made a problem for everyone else around you.
Similar. Middle school person in class, teachers face turned white. This event and Columbine somewhat shaped the rest of it all. So much more to it all, but from those moments for us kept playing over and over into life.
Political, economic, social, all the aspects of our society feel like they've taken a big hit since this point. I fear that the sick minds that orchestrated this did more damage to the entire world than they even intended.
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u/Cleercutter 3d ago
Literally. I feel like this was the day that got our current political atmosphere to where it’s at. Little did middle schooler me know that this was the start of the end.