i remember the morning 9/11 occurred I was 11, and i was not familiar with the existence of the twin towers, so i went on “Keyhole Earthviewer 3D” (Google Earth before Google bought it) to have a look, and the satellite photo had already updated and all you could see was smoke
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
Somehow 9/11 passed me by without the details of the incident making an impression on my tiny child brain. I remember several years later my friend and I were also on Google Earth, and while trying to think of fun landmarks to visit, I said “let’s look at the twin towers.”
“Why?” he said. “There’s nothing there any more.”
And that was how I found out what happened to the twin towers.
That is incredible. Especially if you live in the U.S.
Australia ^__^;
Okay, that’s easier to believe, and I’m sorry my stupid country dragged your stupid country into multiple war crime invasions.
No hard feelings. My stupid country was (and is) far too eager to please war-crime-doers
I was a baby when it happened but I found out about it while watching days of our lives w my mom when I was 4 or 5 bc they had a memorial thing during commercial break and my mom saw that it freaked me out bc I didn’t understand what was going on so she put on gumby. So now anytime I see gumby I think about that.
I was 2 years old when it happened, so have no memory of it. I remember being in like 3rd grade and our science teacher would go on these tangents; looking back, I think she maybe wasn’t in a healthy place mentally, but I digress. On one of her tangents she talked about 9/11 and, because 2001 was that long ago to my child brain, I just had this black-and-white footage playing in my mind of a couple zeppelins gently bonking into some towers in Minneapolis/Saint Paul (Twin Towers in the Twin Cities. I mean, why else would they call them that?).
I was 8, I remember all the teachers being weird all day and recess being canceled. After I got home I finally heard what happened. However Hollywood action movies had so severely skewed my understanding of reality outside the rural area I lived, that I thought that sort of thing was normal and didn’t understand why these buildings in particular getting destroyed was such a big deal.
I was 11, and didn’t know the twin towers were the world trade center until this. Mom drove me to school, same as ever, but we were met at the door by a teacher who told us something serious was going on. So we both went inside and on a TV from the AV room the handful of us who’d arrived that early caught the news with the staff. After about ten or so minutes everyone just kind of agreed school was closed for the day. We drove home listening to NPR coverage, and my folks watched it on TV all week. And probably for months and months after, as the forever war got more and more real.
I don’t remember how I felt about it at first, really. I wasn’t terrified, or afraid it was going to happen again. But you know I felt awful about the folks who died. That was a very vivid and graphic topic of discussion for a long time. The people who jumped and all. The hero survivors. I guess to make us all as mad as possible. I also really didn’t know anything about Islam, and in the weeks following I heard a lot of terrifying things said of and about Muslims. I already had a sour view of the religious, and I could condemn the whole thing on religious grounds, but that edgy young atheist shit really softened when people just started attacking Indians, Sikhs, Jews, Muslims, and anyone even remotely similar in outward appearance, religious, or cultural practice, to the nebulous stereotype of “Middle-Eastern,” which was now synonymous with “terrorist.”
I had no real idea how fucking awful it was to be non-White and non-Christian in America until this happened. I mean, I knew racism was a thing. I knew racism hadn’t ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Civil Rights movement, and that people were always arguing about race issues on the news, and making racial, and even racist, jokes in all kinds of media. But until all of this became the main and virtually only stream of thinking in the media and in public discourse, I had no idea just how insidious and pervasive racism was. It was in damn near everybody, just waiting for an excuse to come out. It was in people I loved, and trusted. It was in me. It was just waiting for an excuse to overwhelm and pour out of anyone of us White folks at anytime.
It’s a virus we all have, and something we all need to work on constantly to deprogram ourselves from, no matter how uncomfortable it gets. There’s no easy guide for how to do that, but I hope I’m doing alright by the people around me. I’m sure I still have a lot to learn, and a lot to unlearn. All I can say is I’m trying, and I’m never going to stop trying, because I don’t want to be anything like the despicable, ignorant, genocidal oafs that run the country I was born in. I don’t want to hate.
It happened as I was walking home from school for lunch. As I opened the door, my father yelled at me to keep it quiet because the whole country was doing a moment of silence. I asked for what and he got mad at me. My mom brought me up to the tv and that’s also when I found out those towers existed and then didn’t, and I didn’t care because an abusive asshole was fuming at me.
The weird thing about 9/11 is that it was 22 years ago, and 22 years before it it was still the 70s – but the 70s are also about 20 years ago
In retrospect, the main reason I knew what the twin towers were was because they were in an episode of The Simpsons
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