When I think of Americans who were alive then and younger, or who weren't born, looking at it as a historical event, it boggles my mind. Everything about this country has been deformed and twisted, every aspect of the society you live in from security theater at the airport to the militarization of local police, all that hardware, to the way the giant internet sites function now (or don't), to all the conspiracy-fueled madness that led to 1/6/21, which is the only other day that began to feel like 9/11. All of it started that day, it's the moment when we entered the wrong alternate universe.
THAT is an interesting, and wildly speculative, take.
It's speculative, yea. But without 9/11 I don't think we'd have a culture of giant military style pickup trucks rolling coal and waving flags (American or Confederate). I think the militia movement of the 90s would have stayed much more contained and minor without something to justify their claims of conspiracy and NWO takeover. And I think we wouldn't have developed the sense that we were all living in a disaster movie, and become so callous and inured to what we see on the news. I don't think I can or should summarize all this in a post, but maybe the best way to put it would be that it ended the American Century, and bent the arc of our civilization towards decay and self destruction. It exposed a crack in the foundation of the country that has grown, and keeps growing. I suppose that could have happened any number of ways.
So not totally far fetched I'd say.
[1] https://pca.st/episode/6deccd04-ca45-404b-8537-c4bbe73fedb9
People should talk about that more. Every single piece of infrastructure in the whole country was on people’s minds and locked down!
Is there a documentary about that? There is so much possibility for an “isolation thriller” where people’s concerns in their small towns are more the focus than the outcome of what happened by the time the dust settled.
It turned out that anthrax came from a government lab, and was supposedly sent by a single rogue employee... though doubts linger.
There were some hoaxes and bogus scares too though of course. One of my classmates almost got suspended for having foot powder in his gym bag.. thankfully cooler heads prevailed when school officials realized the kid had athletes foot and thought to doubt how a teenage boy could have plausibly procured weaponized anthrax spores in the first place. But yes, the hysteria was palpable.
Man that time period must have been so much harder for adults than the teenagers at the time
I was in Brighton Conference Centre (Uk) where Tony Blair was due to give a very heavily trailed speech.
After Tower one got hit we all went out of the main auditorium - I then realized I had stupidly left my bag unattended and had to go back and retrieve it.
After tower two got hit a lot of us started to think what if they have a plane targeting Tony and this building - though its a grim thing to say the RAF QRA where armed
I was in math class. The phone in the classroom rang and my teacher turned on the radio (1010 WINS) immediately. After hearing what had happened she broke down in tears because her husband worked in WTC. My parents worked in NYC (as did most of my classmates' parents) and was very concerned.
The school district evacuated the elementary schools to the gym at the middle school because our town had a major dam and there were concerns that could be attacked too, which would've flooded the low-lying areas where the elementary schools are. Eventually, school was dismissed and I ended up at my neighbor's house. Her husband was a FDNY Captain.
So many people I know died or were permanently harmed (physically or mentally) that day.
While nearly every second of that day is permanently etched into my brain, there's one day that's even more vivid. My FDNY Captain neighbor took me to ground zero in early November 2001. I'll never, ever forget the smell of burning flesh and the hundreds of firefighters using rakes looking for human remains. He told me to never forget, and I never will.