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
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
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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