- cross-posted to:
- chapotraphouse
- cross-posted to:
- chapotraphouse
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Someone who wasn't alive at the time simply will not be able to understand how totally it took over all of culture and identity.
I have a vivid memory of a girl I knew coming to school with red white and blue clothes and wearing U.S. flag facepaint while she walked around sobbing, this was on the west coast and I'm almost positive she knew no one who was there.
I remember being on sites like Neopets, and they were full of people drawing pictures of their digital animal characters saluting the American flag while a single tear drifts down their face. It was utterly bizarre.
Neopets was a bizarre place overall back in the day. I still remember JazzInvincible being a celebrity of sorts and some guy named Matt making threads announcing his arrival getting several hundred replies.
Wasn't it run by scientologists at one point before being acquired by Nickelodeon?
Apparently so, but I just looked it up because I hadn't heard about that.
I was alive, unemployed and 21 at the time. I remember going to a professional office-type job interview not long after and the hiring manager was talking about the dress code for casual Fridays and said no racist language/imagery, unless it's against Muslims or Arabs. guy was like 45, married, kids and dead serious.
I remember thinking, as a dumb young adult who expected real adults to still be in charge, "is that really what we're taking away from this event?"
it turns out, it was.
no racist language/imagery, unless it’s against Muslims or Arabs
:liberalism:
rapidly folding dollar bills in front of my child like i'm in 4th grade again to recreate the experience of being 9 when 9/11 happened :pepe-silvia: :rust-darkness: :stalin-smokin: :pannekoek-point:
In the before times you would only really see the US flag at post offices and schools. Maybe a flagpole in a strip mall. But only because McDonald's wanted to fly their flag and it would be weird alone.
As a zoomer I'm kinda shocked by this. Americans being weepy flagwavers who display it anywhere they can just feels in-character to me, I never would've thought it wasn't in front of people's houses and shit back then.
Yeah I just can't imagine Americans in the 90s not being 24/7 turbo jingos
or like 40s, 50s, 60s Red Scare era, I figured they'd have the flag everywhere
People would have one in their closet to put out on like veteran's day or the 4th. You'd be a little weird having it out otherwise. There'd be like one guy at the town fireworks display who had a flag shirt. Couldn't figure out if they were rah rah about the country or the picnic.
Sounds like how people fly their flag in most other countries... damn, we used to be (more) normal lol
Would it shock you to know that we used to be able to meet people at the gate in airports, without having to go through security?
Know about that one from movies, so no lol
Airport security changes in general I'm well aware of
lol what no
i was in the US in about 1998 and it was full of flags. the amount of flags was already ridiculous.
I'm so sorry for you, I wouldn't recommend understanding this
My 9/11sona is a Wall Street ghoul who got what he deserved. His parents did not attend his funeral.
I mean that last sentence isn't surprising at all. I've met plenty of Canadians that seem to be more like confused Americans.
Unless gay-jesus-probably is from Gander or something I don't know what to say.
Why specifically a small village in Newfoundland? Or are you talking about somewhere else?
Gander became famous on 9/11 because of the sheer number of flights it took in once we closed our airspace. People were like, taking airline passengers into their homes for dinner and shit. I know we're all irony-pilled around here but Gander genuinely made the world a better place in a time that looked pretty bleak for a lot of people.
There's a pretty popular stageplay or show about it, it's called Come From Away, haven't seen it myself but it's pretty big for smalltime Newfoundland
It was weird being a child growing up there when 9/11 happened, I recall hearing about the plane hitting a building and in my youthful naivety thought it was a local accident and some poor sucker in a cessna got real unlucky til I got home and was enlightened.
Holy shit I'm pretty sure I went to this school but not this class, same year, weird English teacher oddly obsessed with 9/11, but I never heard about the 9/11sonas. I do remember the WW2 section the year before a teacher had us roleplay being in concentration camps, cooked some shitty soup and shouted at us as we stood in line for it. Might've been the same one
My stupid small town had a full lockdown and a terrorism meter in front of city hall. My teachers flipped out and told us to hide under the desks, lots of weeping kids thinking their parents had just gotten blown up. Everyone became incredibly racist overnight too and at one point the police department came to our elementary school and instructed us on what a Muslim looks like so we'd know to report them.
I lived in the south, like 1500 miles away from NYC and there were still terrorism drills going on as recent as like 2010.
Everyone became incredibly racist overnight too and at one point the police department came to our elementary school and instructed us on what a Muslim looks like so we’d know to report them.
Horrific racism aside, the funniest part is that this implies Al-Qaeda members wouldn't think to shave and put on a baseball cap (I'm assuming they taught a very specific stereotype of "what a Muslim looks like") to blend in before they terrorized a random American small town.
Oh they told us that was a possibility too. One of my teachers gave us a whole lecture about how Muslims could hide among "normal people" and that we should be on the lookout for any anti-American sentiments. We were even told our fellow students could be "secret Muslims." One time a cop in high school cornered me and asked if I had seen anyone suspicious, I asked what he meant, and then he gave an example of someone wearing a turban. This particular racist panic came to its culmination with Obama's election I guess.
9/11 was a really weird time for me, since I was getting around to an age where I was more aware of the world, but also the world was getting extremely weird
Did I mention the daily flag prayers my school did? They did that. Just loop hands around the flag and pray for America and Bush.
I can't wait to hear the fucked up stories people will have of going to school when the 'rona began.
I live in the place the planes came from and I don't remember a single thing being out of the ordinary that day, granted I was 5.
There are probably operations conducted in the global south by the CIA that they themselves have forgotten about that killed more people than 9/11. That's how much blood is on US hands relative to what's been dealt back to us. 9/11 is crybully bullshit.
The most obvious example I can think of being the original 9/11, the one they did to Allende and Chile
