All the chaos of Tumblr, without actually going to Tumblr.
Rule 1: Be Civil, Not Cursed
This isn’t your personal call-out post.
Rule 2: No Forbidden Posts
Some things belong in the drafts forever. That means:
If you see a post that breaks the rules, report it so the mods can handle it. Otherwise just reblog and relax.
See, the thing about invigorating your youth with patriotism is that you have to give them something to fight for. As it stands, the only thing this country has given its youth is things to fight against. Of course no one is going to want to fight for a country we all collectively agree should crash and burn.
I was in my senior year of high school when 9/11 happened. The only part that truly stuck with me was watching people I once respected turn into reactionary asswipes who where equal parts sanctimonious and cornball. Getting scolded about how I don't appreciate "my freedoms" by an imbecile in Confederate flag board shorts and a "These colors don't run" t shirt was one the highlights of my 20s.
It was also the first time I ever saw a national tragedy kickstart a merchandising bonanza. Crying eagle NEVER FORGET t-shirts, country singers climbing over each other to release the most sacchrine slow jam possible, and a whole lot of bizzarept homoerotic proto-memes of bin Laden.
We lost more Americans to the War on Drugs in one month. This was a genocide on our own people we will never recover from or talk about in this context. The reparations for what was done would far exceed one hundred trillion dollars.
we're Canadian
Once I drove up to Canada to visit a friend from highschool, and we went to a pizza place for lunch one day. The lady who took our order brought up 9/11 while we were waiting, and kept talking about how it was an inside job set up by Bush. Whole thing was very surreal
9/11sonas is a very cursed concept
Where were you when they built a ladder to heaven?
I remember being in the 5th grade when it happened and thinking "Why is everyone freaking out so much about this? Like, sure it sucks but I see stuff like this when my mom watches the news all the time. What's different about it? I mean, there aren't even any tanks involved in this"
What I had seen on the news was most likely the various post-Yugoslavia conflicts in the Balkans throughout the 1990's and into the 2000's, although there were probably other conflicts around the world that my 10-year-old mind just filed away as "wars are happening in far-off places". A lot of my classmates at the time were Bosnians who were displaced in the Bosnian wars.
There were 2,977 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, including the attackers. For reference, there were 42,196 fatalities from car accidents in 2001. That means 9/11 was less than a full month's worth of car crashes. Imagine if we put anywhere near as much money and energy into making automobiles safer as we did to bomb brown people in unrelated countries for the next 20 years afterwards.
The attacks were not sensationalized because of the human loss, but the economic loss. Kill hundreds of thousands of poor people and no one bats an eye. Kill a couple of rich people and the whole media empire makes sure we stop at nothing to bomb unrelated countries in response.
I'm only a year older than you. I thought the point was that now on domestic soil, they're able to do stuff like this and that we are no longer safe and "stuff that happens overseas and far away" could potentially happen here.
And then, it wasn't much longer after that, maybe a year, that I realized that the big deal was that we keep pushing people around globally and pissing people off and making enemies and, "innocent" individuals aside, we, as the USA, probably deserved it.
'Probably'
America worked so hard for that.
Americans deserve it like Russians deserve it. That being, yes, but also no. Many of the Russian people are, in fact, only guilty of innocent ignorance. As a northerner in the US, I try to remain optimistic and think that the vast majority of people, including the South here in the US, are the same; people can only act on what they know, and if you're fed ignorance and fear your entire lives, to you, you might be doing the ethical thing.
I truly do believe that basically everybody is trying to do the right thing. It just comes down to who is backed into a corner, who has been tricked into the kill-or-be-killed mindset, and scarcity (or even only artificial/perceived scarcity) of resources.
The problem is when there are people in high places corrupting every system they touch, and those who believe they're exceptions. Even racists are just deeply ignorant people, probably believing they're doing the right thing for the human species and community. And then, obviously, the compounding biases blinding them to reality. And this doesn't make them inferior, they're human, just like the rest of us, and prisoners to their circumstances.
just ignorant
No. Lots¹ of Americans are vicious hateful fucking orcs³. It's not just about wanting to win; its about being willing to lose if you can make the other hurt worse. The ones who are upset with trump say 'He's hurting the wrong people!' not 'He was supposed to help us!'.
You've never seen these orcs interact with someone they knew was queer or a poc. That which they do not understand must be violently dominated or destroyed. Creating enough of a model to understand the other is a kind of attack/desecration on/of their very souls, and my existence is ontologically evil precisely because they could attempt to understand me and be made however fractionally impure.³
They can't be talked with² negotiated with compromised with or cooperated with by their own choice. They are philosophically exterminationist, even if they haven't read any philosophy, and many have narrowed themselves to vessels of that.
¹i don't know about most, but I live here too
²meaningfully. You can exchange words but what you say to your house plants is more meaningful.
³not that the people you're talking about don't exist. The homophobic redneck who thinks eating pussy is just something you do for your best friend when you get bored, and of course she loves her friends, and no she hasnt had a boyfriend in a while, because 'men aren't worth the trouble, why change the subject so sudden like that?'⁴, or the guy who thinks ’black people have super strength in like an x-men kinda way so they probably get paid extra for warehouse jobs; that seems pretty handy! Unless they have to hide it for secret identities or something. That must be hard!’⁴ it's just that other kind exist too.
⁴i have met this person.
There is no need to qualify that statement about Americans. I can vouch for it as an American.
🫂
I was in high school and had the same thought. If a few thousand people dying gets you this mad you must be absolutely livid every day. I remember making a joke about it a year after it happened and the person I was talking to, who didn’t lose anyone and wasn’t pro-war or anything, got so mad about it. I decided never to bring it up again because apparently everyone was hypnotized by a news broadcast of it that I missed, and the whole country was agreed that this specific attack was the worst thing that had ever happened anywhere to anyone.
I can’t stop thinking “Shouldn’t you guys be so much more angry at the preventable COVID deaths? There were so, so many and our president at the time told us not to wear masks or quarantine. Surely the death toll should be generally related to the anger?”
omfg, the last line
Yep. Same thing that got me. I was fascinated reading it like "This lady is fuckin crazy" but that last line got me laughing so hard... I'm a Canadian. Hell, I'm a Newfie. We had people staying in our house who were from the US because a ton of planes landed here in NFLD and a ton of us went to help. Not even I have a reaction that unhinged.
Really sealed it.
No but seriously, I remember in middle school during lunch they fucking showed footage of the towers getting hit and shit. Teachers during the early 2000s and 2010s were obsessed with trying to traumatize children with 9/11. Like it wasn't for educational value, it was obviously them trying to make kids share in the trauma. Everyone wanted to play victim (like the teacher in the post who had zero connections to 9/11) about this and trauma dump it on students. It was really fucking weird and backfired cause I am certain that that shit is why people make shitposts about 9/11 now.
And who can forget, Rudy Giulani, "Mr. 9/11", who name-dropped 9/11 with every response in the debates when he was running for president.
The coldest line I ever heard Joe Biden drop is when he said you could sum up Rudy Guiliani's entire presidential campaign as "I'm Rudy Guiliani and 9/11."
"America's mayor", who helped instill Islamophobia in the us, and whose title has now been passed on to Zohran Mamdani, an African Muslim immigrant.
Out of all the underhanded, racist shit that got slung at Mamdani during the campaign, I think the very worst was the claim that New York would have "another 9/11" under him as mayor. What the fuck does the mayor have to do with 9/11? Is there a secret battery of anti-aircraft missiles that he's supposed to be in charge of???
Yeah, and if he had any tangible effect on the odds of that... wouldn't it be decreasing them?
I think they meant that violent terrorists would invade and terrorize the city. Though in this case, it would be white supremacists and other societal tumors.
Watched the second collapse with my own eyes as we waited to hear from 2 missing peers.
Also Canadian.
Like, in person or on the TV?
Palantir,
In 6th grade, my teacher read us the same book mentioned in the Tumblr post. It's called "We all fall down", and it's written by Eric Walters and is a fictional account. At the time, the book had only come out a couple years prior. It's a good book. It's well informed, well written, and it never talked about who was to blame, only the tragedy that occured. The author is also Canadian and he wrote a sequel that covers the aftermath and emotional trauma for survivors and their family members. It's not a book about the attack, it's a book about loss, grief and shock, and about how people can come together to heal from it.
Of course, it sure doesn't sound like this teacher was trying to send that message. I just wanted to shout out a good book.
I went to a boarding school during 9/11, and a lot of my classmates/upperclassmates were actually personally impacted even though most of us weren’t.
It was quite surreal to be in the middle of that division. I wasn’t impacted and frankly didn’t care about the event, but my best friend there was, and was withdrawn from the school shortly after.
I don’t joke about it, as a result, but I also don’t care if other people do. Nothing is sacred, so have at it.
I was in junior high when 9/11 happened and we were definitely making “Ultimate Jenga” memes in high school just a few years later.
Wœw.
All that and no Loose Change, even.