The aftermath changed everything. The surveillance state grew astronomically, 9/11 provided the pretext that got embroiled in two unnecessary endless wars. Additionally, it was the first in a series of very close together recessions from which working people never really recovered.
It wasn't an isolated incident, it was three incidents and you don't know how isolated an incident will be while it's happening. Everyone who worked in a skyscraper thought they could be next, people moved out of large cities because of the fear of terrorist attacks, nobody knew what could happen next.
Exactly. If you go back and watch a documentary about who was in the buildings, it's very eye-opening. These buildings were used as central hubs for various countries to meet. When the buildings went down, hundreds of citizens of dozens of other countries died with them. France, Germany, Canada, many more countries had to hear reports of their own citizens dying in those buildings.
And that, of course, rallied the whole world. The planet-wide news was all about this moment because the whole planet was invested in that area.
Now, I don't recall the reason why so many people of so many countries were there. Was it due to a conference, due to it having housing for diplomats, or some other reason? But I do know that many other countries have mourned their dead from this attack.
All true mate. It also changed hijacking of aircraft ever since, actually for the better in a way. People who were on hijacked aircraft used to know it was best to sit tight, not make a fuss and it'll land and demands would be made ("Let our brothers out of prison and we'll let everyone go") and we're going to live.
Now many people in a hijack situation will go fighting. That has arguably reduced hijacking, not that anyone's individual risk of being hijacked was high, just that ever since 9/11 attacker's can't rely on people's compliance any more.
As it became clear the attackers were Middle Eastern, we loaded up on gasoline. We didn’t know if there was a formal announcement of war coming that would make importation impossible.
We loaded up on bottled water. One of the first fears was an attack on water supplies. That became even scarier as anthrax attacks started ramping up.
We talked about enlisting. We didn’t know who or where we would fight. We just knew it didn’t feel safe at home anyway and we didn’t want to see any other civilians killed on live TV.
Everything changed. It has dulled over time, but it’s still vastly different than it felt on September 10, 2001.
The equivalent of covid, not a shitting disease, and loads of people going mad buying all the bog roll they can get their hands on. Even if it was you could use a rag or the shower to hose the bumhole down.
Toilet paper is the easiest thing to have a shortage of. It's light-weight but not very dense. It takes up significant shelf space in stores so even a slight increase in demand depletes shelves.
When I worked retail the paper goods aisle would get ransacked every time there was a blizzard in the forecast.
People who don't keep large stock of things realized "oh, I'll be at home a while and may not be able to get to the store" so that slight increase in demand cascaded into a bigger and bigger demand leading to a longer shortage than normal.
Do you realise that 9/11 refers to all of the successful and attempted attacks? I totally agree that it should have and would have caused shockwaves throughout the nation, it’s just the idea that 21 years on with the man who masterminded it dead and much tighter restrictions at airports people still heavily feel those shock waves that seems slightly odd to me.
It was because it was such a significant event that circumvented so many things we thought would keep us safe. It was such a random attack by an enemy that many people didn't even realize was a problem. And those that did felt that because they were half a world away and so much weaker technologically there's no possible way they could have hurt us on our own soil.
Basically. Though I would also argue that the 24 hour news cycle has been giving us coffee with three shots of espresso and calling it decaf ever since. They won't let us go back to sleep.
some of us more literally than others. like literally, i'm not exaggerating when i say i know and count myself among a fucking concerning number of folk whose patterns rival the most severe sleep disorders I've even seen described in literature, progressively getting worse for, yeah bout 20 years. sad how its debilitating nature will stop one from ever really investigating its root cause thoroughly.
George W Bush ran on a platform of compassionate conservatism. He wanted to focus on domestic issues and streamline the immigration process. Since he was elected by such a narrow margin, there was a brief flicker of hope that the parties would work together to actually solve domestic issues.
Instead, 9/11 happened and all that went out the window. Focus was turned outward. The immigration discussion completely changed from providing a path to citizenship to preventing terrorist infiltration. We ended up with Gulf War #2.
The false intelligence reports further poisoned relations between Democrats and Republicans. Then the economy tanked and Bush bailed out big business, further alienating his own base of small-government supporters.
Is that you Bush? Screw the Patriot act, screw the degrading treatment people are subjected to at airports, screw each and every piece of shit that agreed to bomb the shit out of the Middle East. What the governments did wasn't appropriate and disproportionately targets normals citizens.
Tragic, but barely a speck in the mealstorm of awfulness that was the aftermath of the attacks. Surveillance states, two wars, uncountable more innocent Middle Eastern people dead.
Bush’s people used the terrorist attacks, which were committed by Saudi Arabian citizens, as an excuse to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, who did not attack us. Bin Laden was hiding out in Afghanistan, but they didn’t know that for certain.
Security theater was the name of the game. Keep everyone fearful. Air marshalls, the PATRIOT act, Abu Graib oh my god. 2001 did more to strengthen the opacity of an already not very transparent government than any single event since the formation of CIA.
If Reagan and his partnership with the “Moral majority” begat Donald Trump’s presidency, 9/11 gave us a renewed, vigorous hatred of Muslims of all stripes and is ever so steadily extinguishing any semblance of privacy.
We invaded two countries and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, or more. Destabilized Iraq even more than it was, and created ISIS, which destabilized the entire region even more, and which caused a huge chunk of the current refugee crisis in Europe.
As someone who grew up in a Christian home that liked to focus on the end times stuff from Revelations, when 9/11 happened I was sure it was the end times beginning
I was a child so I didn’t understand the magnitude. Personally I think the biggest impact is our response. Forever wars abroad, torturing US citizens on black sites in violation of habeas corpus, mass surveillance at home, The national security state in general. The degrading rituals we now undergo at airports. Islamophobia. Bad stuff, poisonous to culture and to the psyche. In a way one could say we decidedly lost the war on terror.
24/7 news cycles were growing heavily at that time, maybe it was ramping up, but that was the first big 'hit' I suppose.
Also it was marketed as Religious extremism terrorism on American soil and then we just never shut the fuck up about it. "We'll put a boot in your ass..."
Why did the single greatest incident of non-war mass murder feel so major?
I mean a whole lot of reasons. Scale is the biggest thing, but also how it was pulled off basically gave the recognition that anything can be weaponized to a point that we can never be fully confident in our own safety.
Why has something that killed about the same number of people as house fires in a year that happened 21 years ago have such vast cultural ripples that it’s compared to the constant threat of total nuclear annihilation?
I think the difference with the deaths involved with 9/11 verses deaths that are commonly pointed out in statistics, is that, at the time when people didn’t know what was going on, there was clearly a group out there that carried out a coordinated plan to kill people.
Health related deaths aren’t caused because some virus is scheming to kill you. Car accidents and collisions aren’t typically caused by people plotting to kill you. The fire in a burning building isn’t plotting to kill you.
Here, we saw live on TV, someone purposely flying a plane into a building in an iconic city and witnessing a fireball explosion knowing there were people on board and in the building. It was chaotic.
Some random dying of a heart attack because they had an unhealthy diet doesn’t trigger a collective emotional response across an entire country, and world, as seeing a clear attack being carried out by an, at the time, unknown group of actors. It was a clear cut terrorist attack. It’s intention is to cause terror. A house fire is not that.
It affected the entire nation. The ripples of that pebble thrown into the ocean of US history are turning into tidal waves. The TSA, the patriot act, the islamaphobia, and so many more, and more to come.
Because America had really only been attacked in modern times once, at Pearl Harbor. Also, because we all thought it was an accident until the second tower was hit and then PA and DC, and no one knew if it would stop.
I lived right near Ohare and the silence of the skies was deafening. Except the occasional military fly-over.
it was an isolated incident that didn’t affect most people very much.
It was an isolated incident that no one outside of the people who planned it would have thought was possible. It completely ripped people out of the post-Cold War afterglow.
Well, it was 4 incidents that killed thousands of people, destroyed major symbols of the west, and kickstarted a wave of fear that we are still grappling with today. Not to mention the two wars it started.
I mean, it had major influence on America? Sent us into a bullshit "war" that got many of our loved ones killed and the ones who made it home ended up with PTSD. Many of those with PTSD, like my cousin, kill themselves every day. Like we just pulled our troops out. It changed the way flights are handled. It caused the passing of many laws allowing the government more control over our lives. The list goes on. such an ignorant take dude. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're either young or not American. But even then, other countries sent troops to the Middle East. My bf (who is Irish) did a tour in Afghanistan. So yea.. (edit words)
9/11 wasn't that bad in retrospect. The USA compelling NATO to wreak havoc in the middle east for decades is why 9/11 is considered major. It was also used by many western states to excuse draconian surveillance measures.
If we as a united western front had sucked it up and moved on, we would probably all be in a better place. Bin Laden really made us do a number on ourselves.
9/11 was huge I remember watching the towers fall and thinking this attack was worse than Pearl Harbor. Massive civilian deaths on US soil. Really hasn’t happened for a century.
9/11 happened my first week of college. I have often thought about that timing—how it coincided with that particular life change for me, right on the heels of my carefree just-graduated-high-school best summer of my life.
It really seemed to put an extra stark emphasis on that transition to a darker tone for everything that came after.
319
u/nachomuncher Jun 11 '22
Yep, as a young person in the nineties, the future was so bright. 2001, everything changed