9/11 Thread
DJ Eebs
Moderator, Administrator admin
Moderator, Administrator admin
I'm not going to write an essay in here about what happened twenty years ago. I wanted to make a thread about this primarily because I think people are going to discuss it here, and in that case I wanted to cordon it off into its own thread and set some ground rules because this is a sensitive subject that branches out into tons of other sensitive subjects and, well, it's worth setting some boundaries.
a) Our rule about conspiracy theories is absolutely in effect here. If you want to discuss 9/11 Truthers, do so, but we don't really need to amplify the theories themselves
b) Let's try and keep the "jet fuel can't melt steel beams," and other hilarious 9/11 memes out of this thread, specifically.
c) I know that images of the attacks and the ensuing wars have been incredibly hard to avoid, and they've been hard to avoid for two decades. Still, if you want to post videos or images of it, spoil them and put a warning in front of them.
That's...honestly about it for what I have to say on rules. Everything else should be covered by our existing forum rules. I do want to emphasize that "no funny 9/11 memes," doesn't mean that mocking some of the media or political cartoons that came out of this is off the table. It is absurd that Marvel published a comic where Doctor Doom cried about this. And honestly, if there's something worth remembering about 9/11 that won't be hammered home by every cable news network for decades, it's the reaction in the immediate aftermath, and how absurd and awful it could all be, because it led directly to where we are now.
Anyways, I'll get off the soapbox.
a) Our rule about conspiracy theories is absolutely in effect here. If you want to discuss 9/11 Truthers, do so, but we don't really need to amplify the theories themselves
b) Let's try and keep the "jet fuel can't melt steel beams," and other hilarious 9/11 memes out of this thread, specifically.
c) I know that images of the attacks and the ensuing wars have been incredibly hard to avoid, and they've been hard to avoid for two decades. Still, if you want to post videos or images of it, spoil them and put a warning in front of them.
That's...honestly about it for what I have to say on rules. Everything else should be covered by our existing forum rules. I do want to emphasize that "no funny 9/11 memes," doesn't mean that mocking some of the media or political cartoons that came out of this is off the table. It is absurd that Marvel published a comic where Doctor Doom cried about this. And honestly, if there's something worth remembering about 9/11 that won't be hammered home by every cable news network for decades, it's the reaction in the immediate aftermath, and how absurd and awful it could all be, because it led directly to where we are now.
Anyways, I'll get off the soapbox.
+1
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I have nothing to add to this tweet.
This year has fully blown open the fact that 9/11 was just a convenient smokescreen to brutalize brown people and none of these ghouls actually care about anything.
Shit we practically had a 9/11 yesterday.
I remember several years later having a book of photos from 9/11 and crying in my room at night looking at it. Specifically the one of the priest being carried off by firefighters after being hit and killed by debris. I remember the patriotism and the songs and the hands over the hearts. This big dog will bite when you rattle his cage, man. I remember that shit.
Now, here we are 20 years later and one of the last acts of our glorious War on Terror, our divine crusade, was drone striking an innocent NGO aid worker in Afghanistan because we thought he was acting suspicious. Our last act was leaving everybody we roped into our dirty little scuffle to die, hanging off the landing gear of our outbound planes. Our last act was a pathetic retreat. Nothing accomplished. Nothing fixed. Millions dead. No big brass band, no hands over the hearts with a grand jet flyover. No ticker tape parade.
Mission fucking accomplished.
There was just so much death and carnage and it was all right there on the evening news. 8 years old and watching people die at dinner time. I'm reading stories right now about fathers carrying out the bodies of their sons, months later, after digging them out of the rubble and it still fucking hurts.
But man now I'm old I get to remember that and I get to see how we took that pain and we turned it out ten fold onto people who couldn't even point the US out on a map. For every dead American son how many Iraqi children did we incinerate? How many Afghani mothers and fathers had to pick up the pieces of their children, too? What was any of this for? 20 years later and nobody can tell me.
Fuck.
except donald rumsfeld, he's fucking dead
we have that, at least
9/11 happened during my sophomore year of high school and america's response to it has defined my entire adulthood, exclusively for the worse
edited for getting way too aggro
We are all stunned. People were saying it was an accident.
Then, the second plane hit, and we were evacuated. I think we heard the plane fly over on its way to the Pentagon, but that might be memory playing tricks.
We were ran out of the building, but there wasn't any shelter or anything, so we just joined a huge mass of people wandering around the streets for hours.
I was 17 years old.
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I still remember it pretty vividly. I told my mom to come look at the tv after the first plane hit just in time for the second.
And ever since then I dunno if a day has passed in my life where I wasn't, somewhere in the back of my head at least, always aware of the massive body count demanded by our bloody empire.
The stretching out of the war on terror over the two decades that followed never seemed right, but after being beaten into our over and over heads it began to feel normal. In the sense that it's something big and bad about life entirely outside of your control.
As normal as it began to seem that we would shatter so many lives and bodies overseas and far away just to turn a profit the creeping realization that the USA runs on death settled over me, but only in the last 5 or 6 years have I really opened my eyes to how willing they are too turn the weapons and tactics of that endless war back on people here. And over the pandemic realizing that to them everyone is just more grist for the mill.
And I'm tired. And I feel old beyond my years and also somehow too young to do anything to make a change. This has been happening since before I was born afterall. It's Big capital B.
I dunno why I'm rambling about it all like this. My thoughts aren't super organized as always. I guess I just hope someday we can live in a world where we care for one another instead of... This.
I definitely remember some of those free internet games being shitty 'bomb Osama' type things so I ain't gonna pretend I was completely above all that
About 20? 25 minutes after the plane hit I hear over the loud speaker for everyone to be outside in 5 minutes. The base commander pulls up and with a bull horn says A M35 truck pulls up one of the men on it says Be sure to label your container! make it legible! we will be checking! they gather the stuff we are not taking with us . And I see at the other barracks they are picking up people in whatever they can find school buses, the Mwwv with the soft shelter and much much more. Taking us to 29 palms As we get off the bus There are various people directing people to their units
We board the plane bound for Guam. I remember how clear the skies were all the way. We land in Guam sometime that night where we are pointed to an office so we can call whomever you are limited to 15 minute phone calls
It was surreal still as I remember it even now how it was go go go
But things that happened after we went to Afghanistan
I remember coming back in 2003 and how alien it felt as this was not the US everything was different
I remember being macabre and sarcastic about Iraq as it was no suprise we invaded as I did say they could have just said we are going back to finish what we started and the press would have hyped it up as well as Iraq was a whole other can of worms
I can go on and on but i feel I will end it here since this is an awkward thing to talk about
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Jesus
I actually remember some of those
Definitely remember the banana boat one yeah and the rest were very much of the type
Maybe the one heartening thing about life in the 2020s is that most people at least seem to agree on how deranged our culture and politics are? The 2000s were every bit as insane, but it was just treated as completely normal and anyone who questioned it a kook, at best.
Hopefully that’s the first step toward the next couple generations making things a little better, anyway
I think the framing is apt.
We killed a million people to avenge 3000
and now 3000 people a day die and we tut tut and nothing happens
edit: to be accurate, we're up to ~1500 deaths per day as opposed to the previous peak of ~3000 deaths per day
This nation has a long history of grifters influencing the direction of society, but their schemes seemed to completely dominate us for the last half-century. Our society spiraling down the drain so people don’t have to ask themselves Were We Wrong? Was I Tricked?
Yeah if they’re given a chance
It's fucking me up pretty good
I'd say that if you've also managed to avoid seeing it until now, maybe keep it that way
Right after the “where were you when you heard the news?” stuff, this is one of my strongest memories; in the following years being made to feel like I had something wrong with me because I wasn’t all Rah-rah about a war or plastering everything I owned with a flag. This constant sentiment of “if you aren’t with us, you’re with them”…
Some of my “favorite” comics from that thread…
And conspiracy theorists about this are just so infuriatingly stupid. I'm just finding out today that there's people that think flight 93 just.... didn't crash? What?
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I say this as someone who's not from the US, so I could be wildly off the mark here, but I think what made 9/11 so traumatic was that it challenged the notion of American invincibility.
The United States of America, that great beacon of Freedom, that shining city on the hill, emerged from the two World Wars and the Cold War as the sole victor. The last, Great Superpower of the World.
And you can be attacked too. By some dudes in a plane.
What do you do when you're the strongest country in the world, high on a never-ending supply of American exceptionalism, and then it turns out you can still be hurt by a handful of determined foreigners?
What's just another disease compared to that kind of trauma?
My mom told me about it as I was waking up.
I had to go work at Triple A that day. It was right before school started up again.
I remember almost nothing but that very vivid moment in the morning, and then just the general feeling of working all day at a job I didn’t care for.
I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with those memories by now, I think.
the amount of undirected rage was impressive
decent split between "WE GOTTA GO FUCK SOMEONE UP" and "what good is that going to do?"
Well
the answer is it did nothing good, but that wasn't ever the point
I watched the first episode of the Natgeo series they had up on Hulu and that was enough, I couldn't manage any more.
It uses footage from a documentary that was being made about the FDNY at the time and both it and the source documentary are both very well done
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Edit: then of course by November we'd gotten a nearly full retooling of our gear and off to the desert!
This tweet sums up my feelings much better than I could hope to.
(dante is a games writer/indie dev)