For those under the age of 25; what does 9/11 mean to you?

[WalterSlovotsky]

It's hard to believe that the Twin Towers fell 22 years ago. For someone born in the late 90's and early 2000's, most of that generation only heard about it after they were old enough to understand what happened. It's a lot different for people who were there, watching this all go down.

If you weren't old enough to know what was going on when it happened, how do you feel about 9/11 as a young adult in 2023, when really all you have to go off of is news articles and videos, and the fact that it's a part of American history now?

I'm just interested to get your perspective on this.

 

[mrdude]

I was in Kosovo with Nato at the time when Nato had not long bombed the shit out of Serbia, I remember watching it unfold live on TV, a year or two later I was off to the cold climate of (Kabul) Afghanisan and then back to mentally hot Iraq fighting the war on terror and "apparently" looking for weapons of mass destruction. About 20 years later these weapons have still not been found and Bin Laden ended up with a bullet with his name on it - then got dumped at sea.

Do I feel safer than before - NOPE.
Do I feel like I have less rights - YEP.
Have I benefited from these wars - NOPE.
Have Arms companies and politicians that made a great deal of cash out of those wars - YEP.

Go figure, war - what is it good for?, absoulety nothing! (unless you're the one not doing the fighting or dying and making lots of cash).

 

[Xzi]

I was in Kosovo with Nato at the time when Nato had not long bombed the shit out of Serbia, I remember watching it unfold live on TV, a year or two later I was off to the cold climate of (Kabul) Afghanisan and then back to mentally hot Iraq fighting the war on terror and "apparently" looking for weapons of mass destruction. About 20 years later these weapons have still not been found and Bin Laden ended up with a bullet with his name on it - then got dumped at sea.

Do I feel safer than before - NOPE.
Do I feel like I have less rights - YEP.
Have I benefited from these wars - NOPE.
Have Arms companies and politicians that made a great deal of cash out of those wars - YEP.

Go figure, war - what is it good for?, absoulety nothing! (unless you're the one not doing the fighting or dying and making lots of cash).

GWB and Cheney didn't commit or help plan 9/11, but they sure as shit let it happen. That's not even a conspiracy theory, the intelligence briefs about hijackers using planes as bombs were on the president's desk months in advance. Conservatives value war profiteering over the lives of their own countrymen.

 

[stanna]

https://www.banned.video/watch?id=64ff7142c5d54ea882044726 let's educate them

 

[Ryccardo]

(now 28 but yea)

Among other reads, as a kid I dug "how these common technologies work, illustrated" books - one I got in 2003 (a distinct step down in quantity and detail than my favorite, but I digress) had various tangentially related photos as top-of-the-page borders, each with title and author mentioned, but the NY panorama stood out because they went out of their way (as in, 4x the text) to emphasize something like «this photo was taken before september 2001, we considered replacing it but ultimately didn't out of respect»;

I don't think I knew what they meant until 2009 (middle school, when history classes officially expand to post-WWII, but also when I went to Ireland for 2 weeks with other teens, you know the years of Symbian, the first affordable GB-sized microSDs, and bluetooth - among the tons of music/photos/videos we traded was a "twin towers explosion.3gp"), maybe I'd read some memes or whatever online before that but I didn't particularly notice them...

Of course I now know that jet fuel can't melt steel beams in an atmosphere with ordinary oxygen content despite having failed hard organic chemistry in the last year of high school, despite all the naysayers the internet is king for self-education!

 

[Xzi]

Conspiracy theories used to be a good exercise in critical thinking, these days they're just designed to help certain people deny the facts right in front of their faces. 9/11 should've taught us that the enemy within is just as dangerous as the enemy outside our borders, but we only waited two terms to elect another dumb-as-bricks jackass who got over a million Americans killed with his failed pandemic response. Too many people treating government like it's a reality TV show.

 

[WalterSlovotsky]

Conspiracy theories used to be a good exercise in critical thinking, these days they're just designed to help certain people deny the facts right in front of their faces. 9/11 should've taught us that the enemy within is just as dangerous as the enemy outside our borders, but we only waited two terms to elect another dumb-as-bricks jackass who got over a million Americans killed with his failed pandemic response. Too many people treating government like it's a reality TV show.

You know, I like you, buddy, but I fear that your obsession with being a hardcore leftist liberal is your all-consuming focus in life, and I wonder if it does your mental health any good.

You let no opportunity pass to bash and hate anyone who isn't a liberal, for any reason at all.

There's so much more to life than politics. You don't need to view EVERYTHING through the lens of "This is conservative and this is liberal". You are a militant leftist, and damned near radical. That's never good, for anyone.

I hope you find some sense of balance, brother.

 

[Ryccardo]

Too many people treating government like it's a reality TV show.

As it is? Perfect source of clickbait for Big Media and the same benefit to the Common Man?

 

[Xzi]

You let no opportunity pass to bash and hate anyone who isn't a liberal, for any reason at all.

You made a post about 9/11 and didn't expect GWB to catch any flak? Delusional. If this was a thread about the railway strikes, I'd have no issue bashing Biden's response to that. You might be perfectly happy with incompetence in government, but I am not. We're meant to hold politicians to a higher standard than that, and when we don't, shit hits the fan.

You are a militant leftist, and damned near radical. That's never good, for anyone.

Sure it is, it's helped me to become hardened against propaganda, and allowed me to see through the surface-level theatrics and hysterics of the right-wing. If I am radical, it's living in the US and simply observing events as they unfold that radicalized me. As well as most of Gen Z, apparently.

 

[WalterSlovotsky]

You made a post about 9/11 and didn't expect GWB to catch any flak? Delusional. If this was a thread about the railway strikes, I'd have no issue bashing Biden's response to that. You might be perfectly happy with incompetence in government, but I am not. We're meant to hold politicians to a higher standard than that, and when we don't, shit hits the fan.


Sure it is, it's helped me to become hardened against propaganda, and allowed me to see through the surface-level theatrics and hysterics of the right-wing. If I am radical, it's living in the US and simply observing events as they unfold that radicalized me. As well as most of Gen Z, apparently.

View attachment 393532

I am not defending Bush in the slightest. He remains my most hated President in my lifetime. He sent my brother to war, and he came back damaged. I despise George Bush.

No one uses more propaganda than the left. No other party works as hard to cancel people who don't drink the Kool Aid.

Luckily, America is getting sick of it, and we're not going to be forced to accept jabs, or use preferred pronouns, or let men compete against actual women, or allow racists to set up their own segregated sections in colleges and universities that are federally funded.

The left continues to get slapped down for their tyranny and attempts to control the public, and that's a good thing.

 

[Delerious]

GWB and Cheney didn't commit or help plan 9/11, but they sure as shit let it happen. That's not even a conspiracy theory, the intelligence briefs about hijackers using planes as bombs were on the president's desk months in advance. Conservatives value war profiteering over the lives of their own countrymen.

I don't think this is exclusively a conservative thing as much as it is just a thing with people in power. Doesn't really matter where their political alignment is.

 

[zekro94]

I don't really remember when I learned about 9/11, but I guess it could have been when I was 10 or 11, I didn't really get the impact it had on the lives of people, wasn't interested at that age, but once I got to use 9gag I saw memes of it and it gained more presence in my mind. I don't really remember how the world was pre 9/11 but I read it was better, it still didn't impact me since I'm european so it didn't have so much importance as in the US. Now that I think about it I was 7 when it happened and it deffinitely feels weird sometimes, like with so many things that happened in the world after 9/11 it doesn't feel as if it was the worst. I still remember the 2004 tsunami somewhere in asia

 

[PopcornSweetie]

Nothing.

 

[WalterSlovotsky]

I just want to be able to laugh at things again. To be able to make jokes about things again.

Comedy was the last refuge to get away from all of this partisan hatred and divisiveness, and now we can't even have that.

I grew up with Married With Children and Roseanne and Ren & Stimpy. My parents watched reruns of The Jeffersons and All In The Family. NONE of that shit would fly today, and that's a tragedy.

I am just sick of people's FEELINGS mattering so much. America has never been more filled with soft ass pussies who want everything that they feel to be validated by others, and if it isn't, it's time to sue, time to cancel, time to contain, time to attack.

It's OKAY to not agree. It's OKAY to have differing views and motivations. What is important is to find the common ground and a shared sense of morality. Build from that base, without attacking the individual.

Attack IDEAS, not people. Combat POLICY, not humans.

I would hate to think that everything about me could be summed up by my allegiance to whatever political party I supported. We're all much more complex than that, and it does disservice to every human being to just instantly shove someone into a box because you could slap a label onto them.

Which is to say nothing of the gall, audacity and conceit of automatically thinking that one person is better than another, based solely on which American political party they align with. It's also very myopic. The world is vast, and there are thousands of different ways of life, none of which relate to American politics.

I try to expand my worldview so I don't just view the world through the lens of "Labor/Democrat" or "Right/Conservative".

One of the hardest lessons I've learned in life was to see the world in shades of grey, and I am still learning.

 

[Xzi]

No one uses more propaganda than the left. No other party works as hard to cancel people who don't drink the Kool Aid.

Societal norms and expectations didn't go away just because Trump got elected, sorry. It's always been and always will be faux pas to act like a jackass in public. Hopefully the right starts recognizing that again after Trump finally faces the consequences of his actions.

I don't think this is exclusively a conservative thing as much as it is just a thing with people in power. Doesn't really matter where their political alignment is.

The evidence is all to the contrary, at least during my lifetime. Democrats have their flaws, but they don't try to sell horse paste and beans from the White House during a pandemic. The bar just keeps getting lower in that regard.

 

[WalterSlovotsky]

Societal norms and expectations didn't go away just because Trump got elected, sorry. It's always been and always will be faux pas to act like a jackass in public. Hopefully the right starts recognizing that again after Trump finally faces the consequences of his actions.


The evidence is all to the contrary. Democrats have their flaws, but they don't try to sell horse paste and beans from the White House during a pandemic. The bar just keeps getting lower in that regard.

There you go again. MAN, you spend a lot of time with Daddy Trump taking up free space in your head.

Serious question, man. How many hours a day do you spend obsessed with Donald Trump? I am not being facetious or catty or anything. Genuinely curious. How much of your time do you devote to your hatred of this man?

Does it do you ANY good? Does it EVER make you feel good, or does it improve your life in any way?


Have you done anything with your firmly held beliefs? Have you ever gotten involved with local politics, or your local school board? Have you organized anything to support a cause you believe in? Or, do you just spend hours every day complaining about a man who hasn't been your President for years, while the current President lets the country litterally burn while he does nothing but fumble over his words and sniff struggling children?

I'd think the Dems could use a radical ninja like you on their team. You should go sign up somewhere to be a something that does something besides making posts on online forums about how badly you hate the mean, mean Orange Man with Small Hands.

Just a thought. Still love you, buddy.

 

[Xzi]

There you go again. MAN, you spend a lot of time with Daddy Trump taking up free space in your head.

The second you bring up "cancel culture" and anti-vaxx sentiment it's obvious your viewpoints are derived entirely from one specific smooth-brained shitstain. Widen your horizons and the topics won't keep circling back around to him.

Have you done anything with your firmly held beliefs? Have you ever gotten involved with local politics, or your local school board?

Except for the school board stuff, yes. Colorado's politics are some of the most progressive in the entire nation, so I feel pretty good about that. Odds are we'll be one of the first states to take Trump off the ballot too.

 

[smf]

GWB and Cheney didn't commit or help plan 9/11, but they sure as shit let it happen. That's not even a conspiracy theory, the intelligence briefs about hijackers using planes as bombs were on the president's desk months in advance. Conservatives value war profiteering over the lives of their own countrymen.

I don't think you are right. While they may have been warned about it, I don't think anyone expected it to happen.

I think you could still do it now, it would just take a bit more planning. The reason these things don't happen is that people in general don't want to do them.

No one uses more propaganda than the left. No other party works as hard to cancel people who don't drink the Kool Aid.

One party works harder, republicans.

 

[supermist]

I just want to be able to laugh at things again. To be able to make jokes about things again.

Comedy was the last refuge to get away from all of this partisan hatred and divisiveness, and now we can't even have that.

I grew up with Married With Children and Roseanne and Ren & Stimpy. My parents watched reruns of The Jeffersons and All In The Family. NONE of that shit would fly today, and that's a tragedy.

I am just sick of people's FEELINGS mattering so much. America has never been more filled with soft ass pussies who want everything that they feel to be validated by others, and if it isn't, it's time to sue, time to cancel, time to contain, time to attack.

It's OKAY to not agree. It's OKAY to have differing views and motivations. What is important is to find the common ground and a shared sense of morality. Build from that base, without attacking the individual.

Attack IDEAS, not people. Combat POLICY, not humans.

I would hate to think that everything about me could be summed up by my allegiance to whatever political party I supported. We're all much more complex than that, and it does disservice to every human being to just instantly shove someone into a box because you could slap a label onto them.

Which is to say nothing of the gall, audacity and conceit of automatically thinking that one person is better than another, based solely on which American political party they align with. It's also very myopic. The world is vast, and there are thousands of different ways of life, none of which relate to American politics.

I try to expand my worldview so I don't just view the world through the lens of "Labor/Democrat" or "Right/Conservative".

One of the hardest lessons I've learned in life was to see the world in shades of grey, and I am still learning.

This meltdown came out of nowhere

 

[Delerious]

The evidence is all to the contrary. Democrats have their flaws, but they don't try to sell horse paste and beans from the White House during a pandemic. The bar just keeps getting lower in that regard.

Maybe you should be more specific about what you mean by "conservatives" then? Also, you kind of detracted from the subject of war profiteering there. In the modern American sense, I can understand where you're coming from, but you're also kind of generalizing when you say it's conservative people, even though political beliefs are largely on a spectrum, even among people who are "liberal" or "conservative. This is why I mostly categorize it as it being twisted people who are in power when it comes to profiting off of war. Once you start lumping the general populous in with them, or even the soldiers who they've tragically convinced to fight their wars for them, you start to lose sight of the actual problem, and you paint a target on the backs of people who may not even be in support of such actions and may even be outright oblivious to them.