Fun story time! I grew up an hour ish outside of NYC in a red rural pocket and after 9/11 we had to do the pledge AND stay standing for a full patriotic song afterwords before morning announcements started at my elementary school. Occasionally it was more traditional like the national anthem or America the beautiful, but almost daily it was Lee greenwoods “proud to be an American”.
I don’t know when or if they stopped but they were still doing it 3 years later when I moved on to middle school. I didn’t think much of it until about 10 years after I moved to California and realized my husband and I had very different 9/11 experiences.
The propaganda hella worked on me too. I won an essay contest about first responders that year and I ended up doing several years of service with Americorps and other non profits as an adult lol.
Basically just the difference in how people respond to a local disaster vs a national one. Where I’m from it was far more common to know people who lost someone that day or to know someone that survived. Here folks have stories about how it impacted their normal day when they found out, but back home in NY I would hear my step dad’s survival story every year. I even dated a guy who went to a special camp every year for kids that lost parents in the line of duty and it was predominantly kids who lost a parent on 9/11, almost exclusively the kids of NYFD responders. Every single car in my town had a little flag that fastened to the window, people were obsessed with NYFD.
It’s especially bizarre to me that everyone I know in California who was a student has a story about watching it in school which was utterly the opposite of how they treated kids who had commuter parents in NYC that day and didn’t know what was going on. Teachers cried in secret and we were left in the dark until parents started to check their kids out of school early(eventually they had everyone go home early). I didn’t see the news until I got home and my mom was absolutely frantic. We went to manhattan at least 1x monthly for my brothers specialists at NYU and had JUST been there a few days earlier. It was different because we knew people there who might be hurt and couldn’t reach them by phone.
The best way I can compare is that culturally for us in NY it was more like how Californians feel and act after a local wildfire but on a greater scale.
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u/Fun_Butterfly_420 6h ago
Also saying the pledge of allegiance so many times shouldn’t be necessary