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.
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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