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.
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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