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
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u/ElectricityIsWeird 11h ago
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.