You know.. as someone born after the event.. I feel as if I can't grasp the full magnitude of 9/11. Like. I can fully grasp the tragedy of so many lives being lost. But since I never lived in pre 9/11 times I can't grasp the idea of why it was so massive
I wasn’t alive either but I think it just shattered a lot of peoples world view. I assume there was an air of safety, or peace. From what I understand no one could have possibly imagined something like that was even possible. Nowadays it’s joked about and seems obviously like something terrorists could do, but before that, no one would have believed you if you said it was about to happen.
No human being would actually hijack a plane full of innocent lives and deliberately fly it into a building full of thousands more. Until they did.
This is exactly it. There were bombings before, there were plane hijackings before, but the absolute scale of it was unimaginable at the time.
Especially, imagine if you will, the real-time progression from "holy shit they hit one of the twin towers with a plane, a whole bunch of people just died", to "holy shit they hit the SECOND twin tower with a plane while everyone watched live. A whole bunch more people just died basically in front of my eyes", to "oh my god, they actually fully collapsed. These massive buildings just fell down on themselves. Fucking EVERYONE there just died all at once."
We had no idea any of that was going to happen until it did, and the tragedy just kept getting worse and worse on a larger and larger scale.
The progression for us was: after the first one we thought it was an accident, the second one was the holy fuck what the fuck is going on moment. And then the pentagon one was like, all bets are off, what even is the full scope of this, how many more are there going to be, we thought it could be any scale at that point. There were false reports of missing planes and other targets all morning before things settled down.
This is a great point that we thought the first one might've "just" been a tragic accident. The confirmation that it was absolutely planned and coordinated with the second tower and then the Pentagon was devastating.
Don’t forget the Pentagon, and there was all kinds of unconfirmed reports of other attacks or things. It was panic, chaos and fear all over. For a while US airspace was completely shut down - every single non-military flight was grounded.
Yeah, absolutely. I remember there wasn't a good idea for a while about how badly the Pentagon had been damaged, too. Like, was it also smoking rubble? How vulnerable exactly would bringing down the Pentagon make us to more attacks--either from the same group or even opportunistic attacks from other sources?
And yeah.. no planes in the sky at all was almost eerie. There wasn't much call for military flights in my area, but I imagine in other areas it was just as bad to know anything flying over was either emergency military or, who knows, another hijacked plane?
I remember being in a college class after the planes hit and someone saying the Pentagon also got hit. I thought to myself “that seems unlikely,” and then saw the confirmation after all classes were canceled.
What you just described is my exact memory. I was in 9th grade and the teachers were instructed to turn on the news in all the classrooms. We opened to the smoking tower and trying to process what was happening when the second plane hit. Oh shit! That’s what was happening!
It was just a continually spiraling thing. One tower, the other, the pentagon, the plane in Pennsylvania. Then there were all the anthrax letters. no one knew the scope, just that the scope kept growing.
To respond directly to you. I was a junior highschool. It was so beyond belief that everyone was trying to figure out what could have gone so catastrophically wrong that a pilot was that low, in New York air space and hit the tallest building in the city. Not one believed it could have been intentional until the second plane hit. We were all watching tv.
Where I was it was I think still first period. We came in and we're all goofing around in homeroom. My school was small and the two oldest classes were about 40 kids. We were having fun since the teachers were like 30 mins late, two students were talking about how we were under attack, they just heard. There was some talk back and forth about how they were hearing wrong, and someone else pipes up saying it was true. I told them if something big was going on the teachers would say something.
Almost of cue our social studies teacher came in with a TV and said "something happened, some of you might have heard, we all talked and we think you are mature enough to watch with us. Four or 5 teachers sat in the back of the room talking in hushed voices while we all watched. We watched live as the second plane hit. I thought it was a recap of the first impact. My friend Ashley screamed.
We all sat in a classroom together and called out what we saw. It was almost like it was so horrifying that your brain couldn't fully understand what was happening. The people jumping out of windows.... You sat and you watched people.... Human beings... Fall forever... And all you wanted to do was was reach through the TV and save them. And in a macabre fashion the cameras kept zooming in. Forcing on them.... People with families, humans going about their day, someones son or daughter, and what felt like the would world just watched their last moments... Most didn't move. They just seemed to accept it.
Most people watched the news for a week straight. After the first day there wasn't anything new to report. Just more death and sorrow. While it is a VERY hard read/listen. The stories of the "the walking dead of 9/11" just added to the horror. First responders triaging and the people that were moving still, some walking, some sitting and talking with half their head gone, half their body gone, just in shock and their body didn't realize yet that they should be dead.
I'm sorry if there are typos or me trying to reword stuff doesn't make sense. It's a lot.
There are only podcasts and recordings from first responders and people on the ground. I've only run into them on occasion. But it's not the dust thing. It's people that we so badly injured by debris falling. Or people that responders had no idea how they got where they were found. Try searching for first hand stories. The one that stuck with me was a lady that wanted to call her daughter and she was just sitting there and the back of her skull was gone. Something fell off the buildings and sheered her skull off. But she was just sitting there in shock talking normally....
The towers collapsing created a dust cloud that encompassed part of the city and there were videos of shocked people emerging, covered in dust, walking funny like they were zombies of ash.
It had been a scenario in fiction for years. The most directly similar is from Tom Clancy. Written in 1994, "Debt of Honor" is the story of a short war between America and Japan, with the climax being a pilot flying a 747 into the capital building during a joint session of Congress with the President attending.
The book that immediately follows that is Executive Orders - starts in the aftermath where nearly the entire Senate, Congress, cabinet, President, and senior staff were killed in that attack - how does a nearly empty government pickup and continue?
I really enjoy both books, and following that is Rainbow Six, and one of my favorites - The Bear and the Dragon.
Early Clancy was great, I grew up reading most of his Ryan saga. It is a whole narrative that feeds off the last few books, you can see the threads. 12 books in all.
Al-Qaeda planned it to be dramatic, just like those fictional stories. The 20 minute delay between the planes hitting was very purposeful. They wanted and expected people to be watching.
It wasn't just the sheer scale of the attack. Not even the shock of it happening and those people dying. It was also the feeling of dread because you knew this was going to start a war. It was huge, there was absolutely going to be retaliation. More people were going to die. I was in my mid teens and that was the big sticking point for me.
I can't explain the culture of the 00s I lived in after. I was in various darker subcultures and also friends with a lot of hipster/post rock/indie people as well and there was just a lot of artistic, apocalyptic music. Art school friends feeling that deconstructed, broken down vibe, found objects, etc. so many industrial buildings turned into apartments. Or split, run down victorians. A lot of areas that are more gentrified in cities all over were not yet, being built back up slowly after the suburban flight of the 80s and 90s. Still rough around the edges. The war protests were in full force as we watched the whole mess unfold. I feel like that start to the decade really colored what came after.
The US had won. The Soviets were gone, there was no rival in the world. The 21st century was supposed to be led by the US into peace and prosperity and progress.
Yep. A lot of us were terrified of flying for years. There were also anthrax scares, fueled mostly by a few politicians being mailed anthrax, but because everyone was in such fight or flight mode, we all worried it could happen to anyone. For a while after that, my parents opened all the mail just in case.
It's not just that people struggled with the moral idea of hijacking a plane.
The US was literally thought to be untouchable. We had been having decades of conflicts with Russia and other countries around the Asian continent. They couldn't get us, war and death and violence was someone that happened elsewhere. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest we ever got, and we are STILL making that country pay for giving us a scare.
Back then, people could think the US was the best country in the world and there really wasn't that many reasons to not believe it. We were in the middle of progressive social movements. We were still moving towards the positive environmentalism that began in the 70's and 80's. Technology was improving. Healthcare was improving. The economy survived the dot com bust, how could there ever be another economic bubble!?
And as a random ass person, you had so many rights. There was far less surveillance, fewer ID requirements, and nobody cared about who you were when you boarded a plane, applied for an apartment, or looked for a job.
1 it was one of the largest terror attacks ever and so many people died. So just on the scale deaths was crazy. It also came and went in an instant, so although the death count was nothing like covid, covid slow boiled people building up over time as the new normal.
2 Americans thought they were untouchable and separated from the rest of the world. So all the worlds problems were a problem far away with nothing to do with them. With the cold war recently won this idea they were untouchable was extremely reinforced and when the bubble burst in a single day and they did not take it well at all.
I think more importantly there is a 3rd factor - it was live and televised, and so many of us watched it unfold, utterly powerless to stop it, not realizing just how bad it was going to be but it was already past the point of no return.
To speak to your point we watched it unfold live. News coverage picked it up after the first plane hit. So a lot of people were watching. Meaning a lot of people were watching live as the second plane hit and then the towers fell.
German here, It was the first day of School/Kindergarten for me an my brother. Must have been sometime in the afternoon when our mother had turned on the TV to a news channel. I did not understand why or what has happened. My mother just told us something terrible has happened and it is important that she watches. That's one of my oldest memories, likely because of the emotions my mother showed.
I don't know about Poland, but here in Germany it was far from boring evening news. It is not exclusive to America
In the Netherlands I remember hearing the news, initially there was confusion. Single plane, dual planes, accident, and so on. When I got home I switched on the news (we had CNN Europe ) and was glued to the screen. I think most people here remember remember that day.
Not really true. It was main news everywhere in Europe for many days, I'm pretty sure, international flights where a mess globally for a couple of days and that directly affected travel. I watched it all live on tv in Finland, starting from the first plane.
In The Netherlands it was a big event. I remember coming home from school and the news was on and seeing it all. And later the same 5-10 min news fragment was repeated over and over.
This and the 2004 tsunami left a really big impression on me as a kid. I was 10 when 9/11 happened.
Also, it took a long even after the second plane hit for it to fall. We watched doomed people in the upper floors waving for help. To get the full experience, you would have to show the entire ordeal in real time.
Watching a plane-shape hole in one skyscraper was shocking and horrifying in an abstract way, but watching the second one slapping into the other tower like a Michael Bay movie shocked me to the core.
That... coordinated suicide at that scale, live on TV is something we've never seen before, and thankfully, not since.
The only thing I can suggest for younger generations is the intro of the movie Bird Box, watching that gave me the same existential horror watching a mass suicide unfolding in front of your eyes.
And a lot of people's response after was rage, someone or something had to be punished for this. Al Qaida took credit pretty quickly, everyone knew Bin Laden was behind the attacks and that they were muslim terrorists.
That made muslims everywhere at least suspicious and to a lot of people outright evil merely for having the same belief as the terrorists. It instantly created an outgroup in most of the western world that many people were ready to hate and where anyone defending them could be accused of defending terrorists. We can see the effects of that all over America and Europe where fascists have used islamophobia (later on turned into hatred of all immigrants) to gain power.
From my European perspective, it was also impressive how many Americans had no clue whatsoever what their government and armed forces were doing overseas.
The second one is a big one. It was in my experience, in those days, always a major divide between Americans and Europeans, with the latter often being far more aware of the geopolitical role the US has always played.
Given recent developments, it should also be noted that the US called for aid, and the NATO members answered.
I feel you’ve hit the nail on the head. It was most of all about the visibility of it all. 3000 isn’t much in grand total in terms of civilian deaths compared to anything going on at the time.
But Americans everywhere saw it, and since it was in such a huge business junction tons of people knew a friend of a friend who was affected.
As someone also born after the event, it’s also hard for me to understand the reaction people have. I think it’s a combination of a few things. First is the fact that we were taught about 9/11 basically every year in school, being shown the videos of the towers in school and a bunch of documentaries and stuff. Second is (in large part due to social media), increased constant awareness of horrific losses of life both in the US and out of it, including US atrocities in the Middle East as a revengeful response to 9/11. And third, just the general acceleration of the US into fascism and the helpless, nihilistic emotional response that comes from it. So many fucking things keep fucking happening, so each individual event is less shocking, I have never felt like the US is invincible or infallible.
If a plane/planes crashed into a building in a similar scale to 9/11 next month, or some equivalent attack, I’d be of course extremely devastated for the loss of life and terrified for what tf is going to come from this, just like people say they were during 9/11. But I don’t think I’d be shocked. I wouldn’t think “how could this happen?!?” I’d mostly just be like “of fucking course”.
It’s hard for me to even picture what the pre 9/11 world was like. The mindset is so foreign to me
You shouldn’t be shocked that your attitude was prevalent then, also.
I am not claiming mental or philosophical superiority here. I was freaked out too, mad at the terrorists. But, my friend’s reaction to learning of it, “So, the chickens have come home to roost?” really got me thinking.
Did some people anticipate one day there’d be a terrorist attack on the continental US? Of course
But the first one was a huge shift. We have adjusted our lives around the reality, which is what younger people have grown up with - they’ve grown up in a nation that has been attacked and has taken the precautions
That’s a different mindset than “maybe one day”
It’s like school shootings. While there had been school shootings before, Columbine had the most fatalities by a large margin. Someone might bring a gun to school and kill someone they had an argument with? Okay. Someone might bring guns to school and just start shooting everyone? What the fuck.
That’s when security measures were put in place. And most shootings have been in smaller scale.
Sandy hook elementary was another one. Okay, we know that high schoolers might have access to guns and try to kill their classmates. We also know that (still) a coworker might bring a gun in an shoot a colleague they hate or something.
But for someone to just roll up and start shooting little kids?
These are watershed moments, and you really cannot say “oh yeah, many people had the same feeling before” because, if they did, it wouldn’t actually be a watershed moment
I would argue that a country what went to war against multiple countries that had nothing to do with this act of terror, build a globe spanning surveillance apparatus, did not push back against the atrocities while they had been carried out, failed to hold the people responsible accountable, never even apologize, runs a Gulag a quarter of a century later, still has troops in a country they initially attacked, was always rife with Nationalism, Militarism and Fascism.
And this is only the stuff the US did to the rest to the world, not herself.
we’ve been shaped by it ever since our civil war. Lincoln was a great man, but the more you look at how he centralized power the more you realize even one of our better presidents was prone to it.
The reformation after the civil war made it so that the post confederate states ended up with more power than the northern in so many ways, and in that power they once again consolidated the worst aspects as part of law.
WW1 and WW2 proved that america had the ability to manufacture war-goods on a scale never before seen in history. We proved we could be the roman empire army, and then for the next 100 years have slowly let all of the lessons from rome slip past us.
That doesnt even begin to talk about the legitimate fascists in our history. Ford is praised for industry, but very directly helped hitler into power and yet is one of the “good guys” in our history books. McCarthy’s trials are once again burgeoning in our courtrooms, and once again they’re targeting the helpless. Teachers should never be punished for citing facts, or for simply clapping at a public function. But here we are.
I give the many young'uns a pass here who were kids in 2001, but the adults back then who were in total disbelief that anything like this could happen were just people who never watched the news or knew anything about the world around them (remember, the internet wasn't as pervasive back then). This wasn't even the first time the World Trade Center itself was bombed and terrorism was actually much more common pre 9/11 than after it. The OKC bombing was only a few years prior, for example. The world didn't change that day at all, it's just that a lot of very asleep people FINALLY woke the fuck up and realized other countries existed and the US had spent the last few decades ensuring that the US was loathed and hated by half of them.
It wasn't shocking terrorist.grouos existed and wanted to kill people, it was more that people were shocked they were successful with only box knives and 2 passenger planes.
The world didn't change that day at all, it's just that a lot of very asleep people FINALLY woke the fuck up and realized other countries existed and the US had spent the last few decades ensuring that the US was loathed and hated by half of them.
As a non-American I'm glad there's at least some rational comments on this post.
I can't say much about what the world was like before it, as a fifth grader at the time I don't think I would really know.
I can say that it was jarring on an instinctual level to learn as a fifth grader that there are people who hate you for no reason. Who hate you so much they want you dead. And you learn it live, in full color, as you see people jumping from heights even a fifth grader knows are way too high to survive. Then you see the whole building collapse and realize those people never had a chance anyway.
Seeing a building collapse is nothing, seeing it collapse as you can see there are people inside is completely different.
I can say that it was jarring on an instinctual level to learn as a fifth grader that there are people who hate you for no reason.
Crazy that you went through 9/11, the war on terror, and everything since then and you still haven't learnt why so many people's hatred of America is valid.
It's hard to think of something similar because now precautions are taken against this, but you might be able to imagine something like if one day you woke up and an unknown force had dropped a nuclear bomb on Chicago. Who did it? How did they manage it? How many of your friends and family were going to die in the coming war? Is there going to be a draft? Is the war going to be fought on American soil? Is this just the first part of an invasion? How could this happen?
Also, the towers took hours to fall. So we were all watching clear shots of scores of people waving for help from the upper floors while helicopters helplessly circled. And then people began jumping. And it wasn't just the towers. It was the Pentagon and the third plane that was supposed to hit the White House, but crashed in Pennsylvania since the passengers fought back.
No on knew who had hi-jacked the planes. It could have been Russia, China, or someone else. More attacks could be planned. The last time something like that had happened - Pearly Harbor - American got involved in a Total War that shaped that generation and the one after it for life.
I think what someone born after 9/11 can’t understand is how easy flying was before that. My dad had to fly out of town for work and mom would take us to meet him at the gate and watch the planes flying in and out before he landed. You didn’t have to plan arriving hours early for security and you only bought travel size toiletries to save space in your bag, not because they’d be thrown away if TSA got them
I’m not saying that, just saying it’s a massive change after 9/11 and people born after it won’t ever experience waiting at the gate with a “welcome home” sign for their loved one and that’s normal to them
It's impossible to explain. I was in 8th grade, so wasn't an adult when it happened, but the world changed. I live in a different world today than I did before 9/11. Things like the Patriot Act, and the amount of fear that has become ingrained in our society...I dont even know what could happen that would result in the same level of magnitude. Maybe if AI goes rogue.
The nicely dovetails into Far-Fennel-3032’s item #2 above. It was the dawn of that realization that we were not, in fact, untouchable. This fueled the fear that was used to divide us and do terrible things. Like we became more lizard brained, in a way. Idk, maybe that last bit is a stretch.
I don't think that last bit is a stretch at all. It did activate our lizard brains. People were terrified and in shock. It's so hard to explain to someone born afterwards, but there was a very distinct before/after, like suddenly we were living on another planet. It wasn't just the fears around terrorism/flying - there were anthrax scares for a while, and there constant reports on the evening news that terrorists would be targeting small towns next. In hindsight, most of that probably wasn't credible, but at the time, we were collectively in survival mode.
The US had never suffered a serious attack by any outside adversary since before airplanes existed. Even in WWI and WWII the damage was so remote and small or focused on our military - plus we were at war and were prepared for something to happen - we were never touched.
Not only were the major icons of our nation hit all at once, in a way we (the populace, it was considered and warned about with our intelligence agencies) never could have imagined, but there was a serious loss of civilian life. It wasn't an attack by a foreign military against ours, so the whole national conscience was shocked.
Also, after the fall of the USSR the 90's was an era of peace and celebration. Gulf War 1 was such a rapid win, morally and politically justified, that further exemplified the strength of the west that the western world order was - for lack of a better word - happy. The modern world, and even our parents and grandparents never experienced a similar period of peace and calm and hope.
Then this happened - and everyone knew something terrible just happened, that hope and peace and calm was over, and whatever happened next would be traumatic and terrible.
As a child, I was in journalism class in 7th grade watching it live in first period. I told my teacher who was out of the room at the time, and he just denied it to my face - even though he turned on the news channel. Came in, watched more, still denied it. First time I saw an adult "break". Critical moment for my development.
The US had never suffered a serious attack by any outside adversary since before airplanes existed
I think that's the important part. I'm not from the US, so we were taught about 9/11 in roughly the same vein as Chernobyl or Hiroshima. A great tragedy. But just one of many that happened worldwide. And then it obviously was a part of a general terrorist awareness since we had a few attacks in our capital.
I was only in second grade at the time. I don't remember the actual day, and for all I know, it was a pretty typical Tuesday for 7yo me.
But, I do clearly remember that nothing but the news was on for like... the next week. My teacher at the time sat my class down after it all happened and asked us if we knew what was going on.
One of my classmates spoke up and said "There are no cartoons on right now."
My teacher just looked down and nodded, accepting the fact that we were just a little too young to grasp the actual enormity of the event.
Yup. You don't know what normal looks like. Things weren't perfect, but they were much, much better before all that. As soon as those towers fell, American culture changed, and changed for the worse.
I mean, just look at our cartoons. Our 90s cartoons were filled with anti-racist messaging, pro-compassion, pro-environment, and so on. That all disappeared as soon as 9/11 happened. We went from teaching kids to be kind and compassionate to teaching them to be war machines for the Holy War. And now, the imperial boomerang has happened, and our kids are being taught to hate everyone in their country.
I try to point this out to younger people as often as I can when 9-11 is brought up, because do many are fatigued by the "what" and "when" and I don't think schools actually teach it's more serious impacts and how it's directly shaped THEIR lives.
Every single major regressive movement we've had since 2001 can trace it's roots to the seed of paranoia that was planted by this attack. Not just on racism and warmongering, but gay rights and women's rights, workers rights, and class warfare have all been impacted.
We LITERALLY did have teachers just up and stop teaching their subjects and start spending much of their class time having room discussions on Vietnam murder stories and polling kids and how great it would be to carpet bomb an entire nation. It was kind of horrifying.
Why have kids join clubs on "useless" environmental issues like nature conservation when instead we could belt feed them into ROTC and Army prep?
It was ... probably one of the most singular events in US history. Probably the only thing comparable was the moon landing. EVERYONE was watching it happen live. It was like the entire country stopped. Then the airspace cleared. For pretty much the first time since planes were invented there were no airplanes in US airspace.
It was like a power outage when everything goes silent. Noises that you've heard your entire life and never even noticed as noise suddenly stops. That's what the country was like. The entire country just stopped. From children in 1st grade to the elderly haunting a retirement home. Everyone just stopped.
I lived through it and I can still scarcely understand it.
I was born almost 19 years before it happened. And I can tell you the differences are paradoxical. They're larger, but harder to notice.. until you notice. Then they're huge.
Also, I'm not unique in my opinions, but I am an American who has very little love for the country I was born in. I would be an ex-pat as soon as an excellent opportunity arises so fast.
I'm sorry you'll never get to feel the sort of optimism and trust in humanity of y2k. The world we live in could have been a much more peaceful joyous place
The best way to describe it, imagine if Mongolia launched a bunch of missiles into the middle of your major cities for reasons that nobody understood out of a righteous zeal to bring back the Mongol khanate. Except you didn’t even know about that because the only people paying attention to it were fopo nerds so deep into the weeds they had strong fopo opinions of Swedish naval development. But everyone around you was trying to look smart and aware so they described the motives in the most anti-you way possible.
Also this happened at 9am on a school day.
And then afterwords everyone who dropped the ball blamed literally everyone else and every ghoul with grudge to pick came out of the woodwork to argue for a police state citing the BS excuses.
Then in third grade one of your classmate’s older brother described shell shocked kids too burnt out to be shocked by the sounds of IEDs going off 3 years later.
There's a recording on YouTube of Howard Stern hearing about what's happening from the news, taking calls, going through it. As someone who was in school with no TV until the end of the day, it gives a less filtered picture of how people didn't know what was happening and where it was going to end.
People were angry and ready for war, and they got it. Every now and then during the Obama years you would remember that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars never ended. It's weird to me now to think that everyone decided to move past that war, so much so that we are ok with new wars now apparently.
The uncertainty and fear of more attacks that afternoon is a visceral feeling that I'd imagine would be hard to grasp. (The jingoism that followed along with distrust and disillusionment being subsequent chapters. I was in middle school.)
You really can’t grasp it. When I was a real tiny kid, America was untouchable. I had no idea suicide bombers existed. No one around me joined the military. We thought we were safe. We were happy that we missed the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war.
Then my mom caught me staring at the smoke floating over the horizon. She cried, realizing my sister and I would have a flavor of existential fear of our very own.
To be honest, this is how it felt as an 11 year old. I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand what was happening and I remember having to learn a lot of new words like “terrorism;” it felt like a childhood cut short, to some extent.
I also remember an intense wave of patriotism that came over the country. You literally could not find an American flag to buy, everywhere was sold out. After “weapons of mass destruction,” the script flipped though, and I remember being very confused why so many people were so upset about our government and felt so betrayed by our politicians. As a kid who grew up fairly apolitical, and decades after Vietnam, the system (or as much as I was aware of it) seemed pretty infallible to me at the time.
It was not just the lives lost etc, but more like the destruction of an image. As a non American, I still remember the moment. I was at the university, between classes I think when the news started playing on one of the monitors cöode to the library (I think, it was while back). People were in disbelief because it looked like something out of a movie. Anyhow, the biggest part of 9/11 was - imo - that initial reaction that it couldn’t be real because it should be impossible to attack the US in such a way. The image of an untouchable US was what was really attacked.
I think 9/11 kinda cracked the idea of America being invincible. For as many wars as the US has been involved in we don't fight on our soil. Pearl Harbor happened sure but thats larely out of the sight of the normal person and was 70 years prior. 9/11 was the moment the US realized we werent the gods we were promised to be.
I am a high school teacher in New Jersey. And was a high school student myself in New Jersey when it happened.
I explained it to my class today like - Imagine all the rollercoaster of feelings and fears you all went through in the days when Covid was first a rumor, then the lockdown. Then weeks turning into months, people you knew and loved, who you thought were fine turning out to be immune compromised and in danger of their lives. Hospitals overfilled. So many worries. The whole world shutting down and feeling so uncertain.
Now imagine going through all of that rollercoaster in a day. That's what the world went through, especially us all in the NYC area, we all suffered a massive, complex, and fast hitting trauma.
Today its "normal" to watch people die on the internet. If you want to, you get life(!) footage of actual war zones.
That wasn't normal back than. Most of us didn't even have cell phones yet. We watched life, how everyone in the 2nd plane died. We watched people jumping out of a window that day. We watched how two towers fell.
I'm from germany.
I still know what I was doing when my father wanted me to come to the tv.
I don't even know the exact date where russia started an invasion in europe.....
It’s so surreal. I remember my flights to visit grandma in the Before and flights in the After. I used to travel with a sand bucket of toys and plushies. Mum made me leave it home. She actually bought toys for grandmas and toys for home. We never had money for that before. And my shoes had to be off. And the metal detectors would beep horribly when I wore my favorite jeans jumpers. And the tsa would have to pat me down. And I would cry because it was close to a “bad touch.” Everyone was quiet on the plane. We used to bring food back from grandma’s: goat, rabbit, salt fish, breadfruits, plantains, etc. not anymore
One of the major contributors to the shared trauma was that this was at the beginning of the internet era, and at the peak of the 24/7 cable news era. The exposure to a mass tragedy like that, just hadn't really been seen before, and certainly not for Americans.
There was this feeling of hope and invulnerability that pervaded everything thanks to the fall of the Soviet Union and the First Gulf War. The West had won, the US was a hyperpower, and the world was at peace. Sure, there were some local conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, but they'd get better. The world seemed to be on the best path it had ever been. Humanity itself was headed toward a bright future.
And then a building is hit by a plane for no fathomable reason. Did the pilot have a heart attack? What about the copilot? Some cataclysmic mechanical failure? (Where I was, everyone was absolutely certain it was an accident the first time. Terrible proportions, sure, but an accident.)
And then the second plane hit. There was just a silence in the room as everyone recalculated. In the span of about three seconds, everyone had realized that whoever did this had done so with intent and could do it repeatedly. Would they do it again?
Even then though, the idea of killing thousands of civilians as a terminal target was utterly unfathomable. Humanity was in this together, right? How could multiple people decide to do that?
Who was behind it? Some random crazies in the Middle East? No, they've gotta be backed by someone. If it's just some crazies, then... what if an actual country tried?
Comments like yours really make me understand how it is like to be on the other side of things. I'll explain:
Growing up, I also used to only understand the significance of events by reading or hearing about them, because I wasn't even born when they happened. But 9/11 happened when I was kid. I was there when it happened. And I'm not even American btw. But just watching the video and my parents discussing it with their friends, I realised even at 6 yrs of age, that this was something significant. I just knew it somehow. And then over the next few days, the media coverage just made that clearer
So when I see comments like yours, I now understand how people who were born before me would feel when I as a child would only understand from second-hand accounts, about historical events that happened before I was born, be it in my country or globally.
But you've to understand that 9/11 was surreal, even for non-Americans. At the same time, it's okay to not "get" it. Coz you literally weren't even born when it happened. So it's completely fine to not "relate" with the others who were born and were old enough to remember it
The 90s and 2000s were filled with Islamic terrorist attacks in my country (India), and then Afghanistan being brought into focus due to the US' War on Terror only further destabilized the region. You should look up 26/11, which happened when I was 13 years old. It was incredibly scary when it was happening coz this one involved the terrorists attacking multiple important places in Mumbai and then occupying a hotel in Mumbai for multiple days (Mumbai is to India what NYC is to the US i.e., the economic and financial capital). There were other Islamic terrorist attacks in Mumbai itself, both before and after 9/11.
So 9/11 even in this context only made things worse. And yeah, in some ways, it really changed the world. A lot of things became worse. 9/11 was one of the first significant events of my life
I just wrote this so that you get a non-American context. Coz 9/11 did indeed have a global impact even if it wasn't the only reason why the world has changed so much in this century. But I also wrote this coz of what I said in the very beginning: seeing comments like yours wrt 9/11, makes me understand how people older than me must've felt short of words (like I'm doing now) when explaining significant events to someone who doesn't have memories of them, or wasn't even born when they happened
There is a fantastic digital archive at https://911realtime.org/ that lets you play real footage, radio and air traffic radio from the day with a time slider.
I think I wasn't even old enough to talk yet, and in school I don't remember anyone really explaining the details. I have memories of the lessons on the Holocaust, but 9/11 was such a brief brush (did I remove the information? Or was it less focused on because we're European?) that until recently I genuinely didn't realize how terrific it must have been. I'm learning more under this post than almost anywhere else I think, because most of what I saw until now were memes
As a Dutch teenager, I knew it was a huge deal..
But It's also pre-social media internet. chatrooms and things like Yahoo or MSN messenger were super popular and your only real way to know about things as they happened from friends you made online. So almost everyone around the world learned it from live news broadcasts and whatever connections you had or other outlets had new information on what was happening in the world and the US.
I saw it live when we got the first images and live broadcasts directly after, I think almost every channel had an emergency message or got stopped live to show what happened.
We didn't know what was going tot happen next. Because every hour after the first plane, more and more things escalated and there were rumors of several other planes being unaccounted for... we could only wait for the next updates with a delay.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was formed after this event. And within that, ICE was formed within that. Along with the Patriot Act. A lot of the biggest domestic problems going on today can be directly attributed to the response, both culturally and politically, to this event.
It's like when you have this irrational fear of something that is so unlikely to happen, it's silly to even be afraid of it. Like getting struck by lightning. But then you do get struck by lighting, and live. All your fears up until then have been justified, all your precautions against it validated. And then you're given a gun that can vaporize any dark cloud in the sky.
If you have the stomach for it, listen to Kevin Cosgrove's 911 call from inside the tower.
But as for the scale, everyone was watching the same thing all at the same time, powerless to do anything about it, and all of us knowing that the world had just changed, but we had no idea what would happen next.
It’s of a pattern but a different scale of trying to explain preCovid times to someone who won’t have any memories of the time. The things Covid changed, and is still changing, will continue for years.
That's exactly what I felt about the Berlin Wall falling. I was probably 4 or 5 at the time and just remember that it was an imagery shown frequently on TV.
I was in elementary school. I lived in San Antonio, TX at the time. (I was homeschooled). My mom and I had pulled out the stuff to do school and then were taking the dog out to poop. While standing outside with the dog, my mom’s cell phone went off and my grandmother told us to turn the TV on. The next couple minutes are seared into my memory. We went inside and turned on the TV. About a minute later, the second plane smashed into the tower. (We often heard military planes overhead. That was not unusual at all. San Antonio has two air force bases). We heard jets overhead LOUD. We rushed to the porch to see two f-16s absolutely hauling ass over our house at an altitude WAY lower than they usually did over the city. Usually military flights would fly fairly chill until they got to altitude over the city. Not that day. Seeing those f-16s absolutely ripping it over my house made it feel very, very real. We were a couple thousand miles from New York, but it certainly felt very serious as I stood on that porch and saw those jets blast by.
It would be fair to say that it marked the end of Pax Americana, a period where Americans felt optimistic, free to go anywhere and feel welcome (whether true or not), untouchable, and lifestyles morally defensible. In the immediate aftermath, there was a surge of hate and anger, and I think between that and the war, it set us on the track that led to, well... this.
Put another way, it was one of the first things that made the general public ask "why would someone do this to us?" That triggered a lot of cultural introspection and what was essentially a propaganda campaign that urged on right-wing nationalism. The public consciousness split on whether to accept responsibility for our actions around the world and change our ways or double down, and our leaders mostly chose the latter. Individually, most people probably didn't think of it that deeply, but this was all expressed in economic and political behaviors.
I’m 38. I was 13, still a baby but old enough to understand things changed. For my generation and even those older than me it was a turning point. A defining core moment. Much like COVID is now. Before 9/11, this was unthinkable. It’s like we were living in a fairy tale fantasy world where everything was safe, nothing like this could happen on American soil. If you had told people before this that four planes would be highjacked and crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, no one would have believed you. If you had said the Towers would collapse it would have been laughable. These giant steel buildings couldn’t possibly collapse. There were bombs that couldn’t bring them down. How would someone be able to fly a plane into the Pentagon? Really the Pentagon? The headquarters of our nation’s military? The strongest military on earth? We knew things had changed we just didn’t know how much. What the next steps would be? It’s like before we were children and in one instant, suddenly we weren’t.
As someone from another country it is hard to not just compare it to all the other recent mass civilian deaths happening elsewhere.
Congo war, Vietnam, Sudan, Palestine, USSR, …
I totally sympathise with those personally affected, but otherwise 3K deaths feels infinismal, compared to so many other places, including wars the US caused.
Heck it is tiny even for the US itself if you consider Covid deaths and and deaths due to malpractices and bizarre stuff like Agent Orange tests.
It always felt drummed up most of all as an excuse for senseless warmongering and even more civilian deaths.
Probably not what people want to read though, but go on with the downvotes.
for me growing up, i remember the aftermath of 9/11. Years of islamophobia being rampant in mainstream media and culture. TV shows and movies having 9/11 related fear. i was born before 9/11 but have no memory of it as i was too young. all i cared about was when i was getting another pear and a hug from mom.
The people who were adults in 9/11 had a very powerful, invincible view of America that was shattered on that day. Yes, we had Pearl Harbor, but 9/11 was the first time civilians were targeted on American soil without it being related to an active war. To most Americans, it felt random and horrific.
I was 9 when it happened and I remember prior to 9/11, I was taught this viewpoint that America was the strongest country in the world, we're invincible, it's impossible for anybody to attack or invade us. I think this was a pretty common mindset among older adults, especially those who were Reagan supporters.
I know how jaded and privileged it sounds, but it was the first time a lot of little kids felt their country could be unsafe and vulnerable. What could they bomb next?? Because we don't experience wars on our soil, most of us were/are NOT in the least prepared for what that's like, the average US citizen, even now, has no idea how to deal with something like that.
I was only 5 but I remember it pretty well because we lived near Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio and they thought that would be another target, so i remember sitting at the dining room table and hearing jets scrambling. They were low-flying most of the day so sonic booms kept shaking the whole house. It was pretty wild
I'm in those boat as well despite being born two years prior. I have no recollection of the event at all. I'm still horrified at the events, the images and video we see, and recognize things have changed after it. Yet I know damn well I do not completely understand the emotional impact because. Everything that changed after 9/11 is just normal to me.
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u/Norway643 14h ago
You know.. as someone born after the event.. I feel as if I can't grasp the full magnitude of 9/11. Like. I can fully grasp the tragedy of so many lives being lost. But since I never lived in pre 9/11 times I can't grasp the idea of why it was so massive