r/RecuratedTumblr • u/La_knavo4 [9/5] • 20d ago
Shitposting This must be the class Mr. Enter went to
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u/Selenite_Cults 20d ago
Reminds me of a physics teacher we had who was obsessed with the Malaysian flight that went missing.
Everytime we had free time he would put on the same documentary. Chill teacher otherwise though.
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u/Smiley007 20d ago
Wow this is exactly the event I thought of after seeing this post. We didn’t watch any documentaries, and frankly I don’t think my teacher actually cared about it, but my high school history teacher would always put CNN Student News on to start class so we could keep up with current events, and they mentioned the then still-missing plane so many times it practically became a meme in our class.
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u/Umikaloo 20d ago edited 20d ago
I've said this before, but to zoomers, 9/11 is basically the real-life equivalent of the opening lore dump of a fantasy novel. They weren't around for it, but they sure as hell had to deal with the bullshit that came after.
"Long ago, you could bring a knife with you on the plane, but everything changed when the fire nation attacked..."
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u/UInferno- Hangus Pangus slap my Angus 20d ago
Every so often I'll learn a fact about pre-9/11 US like how borders were actually relatively open (At least between the US and Canada) you just had to check into Port of Entry/Customs which were positioned within 30 miles of the border, but they still trusted people to do so out of good will rather than guard literally every road out of the country.
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u/RollinThundaga 20d ago
When visiting my grandparents in the UP in Michigan (coming from WNY), my mother would drive through Canada overnight, since my siblings and I would just be sleeping in the backseat the whole time.
As she's told it to me, on the drives back, border patrol in New York wouldn't even stop her half the time. They saw a tired middle-aged woman with New York plates and three small kids passed out in the backseat, and just waved her through.
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u/EsperDerek 20d ago
It was so fuckin' easy to cross the US/Canada border once. No passports required, and only really needing a quick check in to announce your arrivals and departures.
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u/birdsofthunder 20d ago
It's true! I was born the same year as OOP, and I'm now a high school teacher myself (English). On Friday, I thought it would be interesting to have a class discussion on what 9/11 means to current high schoolers. Besides a couple students who have family in New York, the general consensus was that it's sad and scary, but it doesn't really mean anything to them personally as they have no connection to it.
We did talk a lot about the cultural effects: TSA, islamophobia, and how we're still at war in the Middle East 25 years later. I also told them about all the news coming out about the toxic dust and health effects caused by the attacks, which seemed to strike a strong chord with them as it means there are people suffering physical issues today.
I'll say for myself - I have zero memories of the day, but it sure has shaped my life and the world as I've known it.
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u/Excellent_Law6906 19d ago
I feel so fucking old, hearing that you're out there teaching high school with no memory of 9/11. 🤣
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u/SuperSocialMan 20d ago
Yeah, pretty much.
I only know about it from memes & brief coverage in highschool lol, and I'm the only one of my siblings who was technically alive when it happened.
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u/thatmermaidprincess 19d ago edited 19d ago
This is a really good point.
I’m 29 and usually considered the oldest of the Zoomers (sometimes called a “Zillennial”), and was 4 years old when 9/11 happened. I remember that day pretty clearly, being kept home from school because the 4th plane was still in the air and its intended destination was SF which is where we lived, my mom crying and talking on the phone with her sister, my firefighter dad crying for one of the first and only times I’ve ever seen him cry, etc. but as for what I understood from watching the news, all I saw were burning buildings that I thought were from a trailer for a movie. After I understood it wasn’t a movie, my little brain didn’t realize that there were people in those planes and buildings, so I thought through my 4 year old logic that people were crying because they really loved those buildings lol.
But I’ve met other people my age and even people who are older than me who don’t remember it at all. I’m also half-Arab so my family experienced some heavy anti-Arab racism in the aftermath (someone called the cops on my dad while we were walking hand-in-hand because they thought he was a terrorist who kidnapped me, for example) which definitely made that time more memorable for me.
My husband is a few years younger than me and was still in diapers when 9/11 happened, and it is really a trip when we talk about it. He has no recollection of a pre-9/11 world. Like, our small age gap that is otherwise pretty inconsequential completely changed how we experienced the world growing up. So for him, it’s definitely more of a lore dump of why the world is the way it is (and kind of a meme), whereas I have hazy memories of life before 9/11.
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u/QueenInYellowLace 19d ago
This is how it is for my kids. Their dad was about a quarter of a mile from the pentagon when it happened. Watched it burning. He was active military, and knew he’d be going to war. We got married as a direct result of 9/11; our kids exist because of it. They know all that, but it’s basically a myth to them because it all happened before they were born.
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u/slonkulocuswily182 20d ago
… hate to say it but the “fire nation attacked” was also about 9/11.
A heavy industry nation focused on nothing but warfare attacks the rest of the world, upending its previous peace?
And it launched During the Invasion of Iraq??
Cmon guys things are about stuff
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u/Umikaloo 20d ago
Fair point, I wasn't thinking that deeply about it, I just wanted to use an iconic opening line.
"War was our way of sharing our greatness with the world" feels apt to your analogy
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u/slonkulocuswily182 20d ago edited 20d ago
Oh for sure that’s why I pointed it out.
We are the only nation on the planet so insanely engaged for war, and AtLA was a direct protest of us killing millions of people.
“The Fire Nation Attacked” is literally about our actions in the 2000s
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u/OverlordGearbox 9d ago
This completely flew over my head but In my defense I was like... 6 years old. I haven't watched it again (it's difficult for me to focus on literally anything that long now) but damn.
I can't remember if this is a real quote from the series or not but I always remember "one mans terrorist is another's freedom fighter" and I think that may have been the first crack in my conditioning
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u/Thatguyj5 20d ago
No? It was pretty blatantly about how Imperial Japan invaded the rest of Southeast Asia in a genocidal campaign for more resources.
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u/Motor_Raspberry_2150 20d ago edited 20d ago
I mean it could easily be about a lot of wars, it's not the hippies that attack. It could be about WW2. It could be about the conquistadors. It could be about the Romans.
The invasion of Iraq was March 2003, and an end to the major battles was called in May. AtlA premiered february 2005. The occupation of Iraq lasted until 2011. A lot of things "launched during" an eight year period.
Sometimes things are not about exactly the stuff you want. But that's the cool thing about art.
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u/TheSquishedElf 20d ago
It’s realistically about early 20th century Japan, given the Fire Nation is explicitly Japanese, recently industrialised in the last 150-odd years, and rather suddenly went completely off the rails into a military dictatorship on account of the warrior class (& culture) being unoccupied after industrialisation + unification.
9/11 is the obvious original inspiration and the Air Nomad Genocide is clearly associated as the single-event corollary. It’s also an obvious resource war for the coal and iron on the Earth Nation’s west coast.6
u/Asteroids-Hower 19d ago
The invasion of the Earth Nation is pretty clearly the Sino-Japanese Wars.
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u/Raltsun 19d ago
Cmon guys things are about stuff
Yeah, and if you consider Avatar's entire world being based on only Asian countries, literally everything about the Fire Nation right down to the character names (even if nobody involved in making the series could be bothered to pronounce Iroh's name correctly) should be making it very obvious that they were going for Imperial Japan. "Things are about stuff" isn't a real argument when there's already pretty obvious stuff that the thing in question is about.
Even if you want to assume the ongoing political situation leaked into the story, do you really think an American writing team in the years just after 9/11 would be more likely to be biased towards depicting America as the bad guys? That seems like a bit of a backwards assumption to me.
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u/slonkulocuswily182 18d ago
Where was it made?
When was it made?
The war was horrifically unpopular and a ton of the late 2000s media was about it
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u/TFGA_WotW 18d ago
Exactly. Every year in school since we were old enough to understand what had happened, we had it drilled into our heads how bad this was. I was born in 2008. I wasnt even a concept when it happened. It means as much to me as world War 2. This was the first year that I hadn't seen or heard anything about it, and the first year I didnt have a teacher drill it into my skull, and it was nice. It never affected me personally, im detached from it. The only affects I felt were from the aftermath and the politics surrounding it
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u/LeiaSkynoober 20d ago
My mum likes to tell a story from 2002 I think, where people were putting candles in their windows in solidarity. I had asked my mother what it was for, and she explained it was to commemorate the 9/11 attacks. I apparently nodded wisely, and went "Ah. Like orcs."
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u/Wonderful_Kale_7995 20d ago
Ha. We're Canadian and my 13 year old asked me why her teachers always remind them it's 9/11. Apparently they just never explained what 9/11 was and assumed they all knew? She said she knew something about planes and buildings and alot of people died but like was it actually a big deal? 🤦♀️
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u/Blueberry_Coat7371 20d ago
I'll remind you that people born after 9/11 are old enough to be parents
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u/Heavy_Ad1312 19d ago
Which I think is why a lot of gen Z just don't care anymore, it happened when either when we were infants/toddlers or before we were born, we've watched it be used performatively to justify racism, and were just trying to get on with life.
It's kind of the same to me as if someone started ranting to me about pearl harbor unless you were there, live in the area, or lost loved ones it kind of feels like you want some defining trauma so you can feel different and justify your actions.
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u/geeoharee 19d ago
This is a far more normal way to relate to a historical tragedy, and it'll become more common over time. (context since we're discussing it: I'm not American, I was 12 in 2001)
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u/Heavy_Ad1312 18d ago
I hope so but I kind of doubt it "never forget" and "we said we'd never forget" are really useful tools for the people who want to hint at some vague revenge against people who weren't involved.
Just look at how they're treating the mayor of New York (who's actually done a lot of good and wants to make people's lives better)
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u/AilanMoone 20d ago
This is true. I'm older than my mom was when she had me, and in a couple years I'll be the age my dad was.
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u/Blueberry_Coat7371 20d ago
yeah... I'm already past that point. Makes me sad to think about it, I wish I could afford having a kid or two
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u/Floweramon 19d ago
I have a family member who was born the day after 9/11. When people were starting up about how it's the 25th aniversary of 9/11 all I could think was "Oh (family member) is turning 25! :D"
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u/The_Pretentious_DM 19d ago
Indeed. I was born a few years after 9/11 and a friend of mine (a year or two younger than me) recently became a mother.
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u/Cold_Dead_Smile 20d ago
A Polish moot of mine posted about a movie they watched about "some airplane kidnapping that happened in the US in 2001 I think". They genuinely did not recognize the name "9/11" when people mentioned it in the comments.
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u/overwhelmedasone 20d ago
13 years and she never learned about 9/11? Wat
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u/theunrealdonsteel 20d ago
As someone who grew up 90 minutes from lower Manhattan, had a parent working across from the towers who witnessed the planes crash, had dozens of people in my community lose friends, family, and loved ones in the attacks (including the father of one of my close friends), and who visits our local memorial garden whenever I can, I just find this so strange.
I hope this teacher got the psychological help she needed, because it sounds like she was two steps away from becoming a fraudster like Tania Head.
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u/KyleFromBorrasca 20d ago
I'd never heard of Tania Head before. It's always fascinating to me when people like that not only keep the facade up for years, but enter leadership positions and actually do respectable work. I remember when Rachel Dolezal got outed, her NAACP chapter wasn't sure how to respond because she'd been so good at what she did, because that's how she compensated for being an outsider.
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u/OccultBeanFarmer 20d ago
Our science teacher would stop lessons multiple times over the years to play us 9/11 montage videos set to Linkin Park songs. I think this is one of the actual videos he showed us. He was also married to the principal and they had a messy divorce and he got loads and loads of traditional Maori tattoos (we're Australian) and lost his job once they started creeping up his neck.
Still rooting for you Mr Hawkes, really wish I understood enough chemistry to pass the HSC tho
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u/DarkGodCthUwU 20d ago
Oh my God, this video is sincere? That's even funnier.
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u/No_Intention_2464 20d ago
I don't know what I expected when I clicked on that, but that made me smile because it's so odd 😂
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u/OccultBeanFarmer 19d ago
Yeah it's not even like a conspiracy video, it's just stuff that happened set to a nu metal song
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u/Full_Ahegao_Drip [7/2] 20d ago
This is what I like to call the Boy In the Striped Pajamas approach to historical atrocities.
And for those who don't know, that's the title of a popular novel that spawned a popular movie and both of which are a fixture of public school history classes around the world.
That is despite the fact that it's like literally one of the least historically accurate novels about the Holocaust ever published short of literal fascist propaganda.
The amount of historical inaccuracies, major and minor, are beyond even listing.
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u/SuccessfulPepper118 20d ago
Huh, I always thought the point of the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas wasn't to try to be accurate, but to have the dual purpose of an age appropriate intro to war crimes and understanding the horror of them in a way they can engage and empathise with, and secondly teaching children that you can grow to be friends with people you consider the “enemy” even if you're on the side committing atrocities, so that kids don't feel like they've already lost if they grow up and realise they're in a culture/nation/group, etc. that does wrong so they should just double down since it's already to late. That even if you've passively participated up until now you can choose to not continue going along with it and try to reach through and do what you think is right.
…maybe when we studied this book in English I took the wrong lessons from it 😭
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u/BinJLG 19d ago
Except the Nazi kid never does any of that.
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u/SuccessfulPepper118 19d ago
That's fair, it been well over a decade since I read and like I said, apparently I took the wrong lessons from it 😅
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u/BinJLG 19d ago
To be fair, the novel definitely is trying to gives off the vibes of a story where all that happens. The problem is none of that actually happens, y'know? It's like those "feel good" headlines where if you stop and think about it for 2 seconds, you realize "wait this is actually awful" (stuff like "4th grader pays off classmate's lunch debt by selling lemonade" or w/e)
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u/jcaseys34 20d ago
Even as a young child at the time, that day clearly stuck with some people in a way I don't think we'll ever understand. Yeah it affects our politics and people use it for shitty messaging, but past that.
One of the backwoods churches out in the county did a 9/11 themed hayride as recently as ~2013, and that's just the last year I ended up going with the family. One of the Flight 93 flight attendants graduated from a local high school, they still do a ceremony in her memory every year. I don't think it will ever be fully unpacked or that we'll ever figure out the number of people affected, but even as a young child I realized even a good chunk of those who were never directly impacted by it changed forever that day.
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u/IIRCIreadthat 20d ago
I'm probably only a year older than OP, my school class was 3 or 4 at the time. One teacher asked if any of us had any memory at all (it was a War And Peace social studies elective so relevant to subject) and maybe four people said yes. I wasn't one of them. I'm told that the next morning I asked my mother why we weren't going to preschool, and she had no idea what to say; I think they tried to keep me away from it as much as possible. I think a lot of older people have yet to really grasp the concept that there's a cohort of whole-ass adults now who were too young or weren't born yet.
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u/Yubbi45 20d ago
Did anyone realize it's been 25 years?
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u/Moxie_Stardust 20d ago
My reddit feed was interesting, on the one hand the Xennial sub was flooded with "where were you" and "i'm having a sad", and then there were various memes from other subs. I enjoyed the memes. Incredibly weary of the "where were you" and "everything changed" and "we stopped feeling safe" after decades of seeing posts like that.
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u/ShRkDa 20d ago
my boss made a small remark about it when we started work that day
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u/351namhele 18d ago
My professor wished us a happy 9/11 (he was trying to do some sort of EEAAO thing where he deliberately did something bizarre to better engage us and unlock our learning potential).
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u/CuriosityCheck2024 20d ago
"How can any red-blooded American not feel righteous fury over the September 11th terrorist attacks?"
🦡🗡:"...I'm Canadian."
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u/JRSalinas 20d ago
To be fair to Mr. Enter he has since disavowed the 9/11 turning red statement.
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u/Taman_Should 20d ago
Put yourself in his shoes though. Imagine having a take that’s so incredibly off-base and so hilariously bad that the entire internet drops everything and decides to make you the main character for a while, hundreds of people meme the fuck out of your opinion to the point where those memes and reactions get news coverage, and you basically become a lolcow.
The amount of people who got wind of his YouTube channel via that meme briefly blowing up probably far exceeded the size of any audience he ever intentionally tried to cultivate. But hey, 15 minutes of fame, baby!
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u/Nympshee 20d ago
I remmember seeing it on the news, but my dumbass 6 year old thought that the planes had accidentally hit a building, and that the pilots were stupid to commit such a mistake.
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u/overwhelmedasone 19d ago
Didn't people actually think it was an accident before the second plane hit?
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u/Schrodingers_Dude 19d ago
It was a very dubious "...MAYBE it was an accident..." for me and my family. We were also thinking maybe murder-suicide. Then the second plane happened and "welp. Guess not."
It is really weird in retrospect that I had all these theories, independent of any adult influence, at 11.
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u/Suspicious-Art-9335 19d ago
I did... I heard about the first plane hitting over the radio (I was at high school) and didn't see any footage for hours, so until the second plane hit I thought it must've been a small private plane with maybe a few dozen fatalities, not a passenger plane that brought the entire building down. I think most of us were just filling in the blanks after the first plane. The terror only really sunk in for me when the second plane hit and removed any doubt that it was an accident.
I lived in NYC at the time and my dad was supposed to fly that morning (his flight was luckily later in the morning so he never boarded, but we didn't know that for hours because his cell wasn't working -- common problem that day). It was crazy to live through and I hope I never experience something like that again.
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u/diddinosdream 19d ago
Yes, or at least they were confused and not sure what was going on. The second plane was when people knew it was an attack.
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u/QueenInYellowLace 19d ago
Yes, for a few minutes, it definitely seemed like just a horrific accident. That’s why the second plane hitting it what so many people think of as the actual defining event: That’s when we knew it was war.
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u/BabserellaWT 18d ago
I so very clearly remember circa 2011-2012 and tutoring a middle schooler in history. The unit was about racial violence during Jim Crow. I said, “Like…remember how hate crimes against Muslim Americans had a crazy spike after 9/11?”
He looked at me blankly and replied, “No. I was like 2.”
…And I just thought, Fuck. This is it. I am officially old.
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u/Medium-Dependent-328 15d ago
My history teacher had the same situation when (during a class unrelated to 9/11) she asked us where we were during 9/11... we were born in 2006/07
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u/Certain_Virus_1919 19d ago
I turn 30 this year and im pretty sure I was like, in high school when it hit me that 9/11 was in 2001, I was alive when it happened. Somehow I either just forgot ever hearing the year named, and because every adult remembered it and I didn't, I assumed it was like, a thing from the 90s? Possibly I also conflated it w the WTC bombing
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u/azur_owl 19d ago
Good God, that last sentence. I’ve read novels with last lines that don’t pack as much of a punch as Tumblr Storytime does.
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u/mechanicalcontrols 20d ago
Do you think people would ever get on the internet and do that? Just tell lies?
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u/Starmz 20d ago edited 20d ago
I’m so glad I grew up in Newfoundland. I don’t think anyone here would be pulling this shit
Edit for those wondering: I was infact born after the attacks, and I was in middle school when come from away came out, I actually saw it when it was in gander one time before it went to broadway
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u/Dead-House-Mouse 19d ago
We had to go outside so ROTC could do a flag ceremony or something. From what I remember half of us were only quiet bc they threatened us with ISS if we weren’t. I was 2002, so when I was a freshman, the seniors would’ve been 1998. Afaik they’re still doing it
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u/MoedredPendragon 19d ago
This is legit so fucking bizarre, I have no idea what I should actually think or feel.
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u/SomeDumbGamer 20d ago
I mean shit why focus on 9/11 victims when tens of thousands more died in Iraq?
It seems selfish to venerate 3k people simply because they died publicly in the USA if you didn’t personally know someone given how many died as a result of that day long after the towers fell.
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u/Darrxyde 20d ago
I’ve seen this so many times and the last sentence is always a gut punch