johnwatsonismyspiritanimal:
It has hit me that many on tumblr werenât born when 9-11 took place⊠So I make my plea, please, donât forget what happened.
When you write down todayâs date on your homework, donât look at it as though itâs something you canât recall, or something that happened so long ago that itâs now irrelevant. Because for some of us itâs still so real. For some, it was the day our childhood ended. When we saw towers fall and people in far off lands stomp on our flag. Because for some, we can still remember what we wore. We can remember seeing the plane hit the second tower. For some, we can remember sitting in 5th grade social studies with Mrs Owens and listening to the radio saying the pentagon had been hit only to go home and watch coverage of the towers fall and a smokey field in Pennsylvania. Of spending the next three months with red ribbons on our shirts and moments of silence after the pledge.
Your history books will show you glossy photos but our memories bare a sharper image. We remember the photos of dust covered faces crossing the Washington Bridge fleeing Manhattan. We remember the pillar of smoke rising against a brilliant blue sky. We remember the sight of people stranded in airports in the us and canada trying to get home. We remember the blood drives, the volunteerism, the american flags that hang from the windows to the front doors to our socks.
Youâve come of age in a time where we divide into political camps over emails and tea parties. You canât remember that âunited we standâ once meant something. That it held us together as we made sense of the weeks to come.
Remember 9-11. It has shaped you even if you were too young to realize it. Remember 9-11, the heroes that died just doing what the do. Remember 9-11 that âLetâs Rollâ is as much our creed as âin God we trustâ or âRemember the Alamoâ.
But remember. Oh, dear reader, please remember.
5th grade? I can give you Freshman year of high school. Other people on here (yes, on here, Tumblr, the supposed bastion of The Youth) can probably give you college or how they got a phone call from their kidâs school.Â
If you want to know how much the world has changed, how DIFFERENT the world was before 9/11, ask us. Because none of us, whether we lived in NYC or in LA or in Hong Kong will ever forget.Â
We can tell you how you used to be able to just walk into an airport and get on your plane. Bring your friends, they can see you off at your gate. How long does it take you to get to the airport? Ok, letâs leave like 15 minutes before that so we can be super on-time for the plane.Â
We can tell you how The President of the United States used to go jogging. On the streets of DC. In sweats and with maybe a handful of Secret Service Agents. And the public could join him.Â
We can tell you how no one thought it was terrorism until the second plane hit. Really, there is video of Matt Lauer speculating if the weather possibly had something to do with it. Maybe it was just pilot error. Our first gut reaction was âwell, maybe it was just an accidentâ.Â
We can tell you that Bush was just kind of a dope. Not like dangerous levels of incompetence kind of dumb, but just kind of a doof. Completely harmless. Kind of on-par with Joe Biden.Â
We can tell you about the Anthrax scare that happened right after! This always seems to be a footnote in history books for some reason. But yeah, literally a week after 9/11 happened, two Democratic Senators  and some news agencies were sent Anthrax in the mail. This lasted for about a month. 5 people died. So we had all just watched 3,000 or so people be brutally murdered on television and then we were fucking scared shitless to open our mail.Â
It was different. It was so different then. And when you know what it was like, how much has changed, and what we lost, you can kind of understand why we are where we are. Why the TSA was founded. Why Homeland Security was created. The continuation of these things in spite of the lack of evidence of success or deterrence, the abuses of freedom that they lead to are not OK. But when you really know in detail what changed, its understandable at least, why we started on this path. Because we were fucking scared.Â
I graduated high school in the spring of 2001 and I was at work the morning of 9/11. I worked in the daycare at the YMCA in the mobile infant room. It was after giving them their breakfast and we were working on a little craft project when one of the other teachers came back from a buggy ride with a few of the babies. She saw the news coverage on one of the TVs out in the main building and, with no television in our classrooms, we were forced to get incoming information over the FM radio. Every chance we got, one of us would sneak out and find a television, reporting back with what we saw. It was such a strange thing- hearing bits and pieces and putting it all together, all the while taking care of these little babies who hadnât a clue about what had happened and how profoundly the world had changed.
I was in 8th grade getting ready for school when my step dad (originally from NYC) told me I wasnât going to school. I remember being in shock watching the news from Los Angeles. I will always remember September 11, 2001
I was a sophomore in college. We werenât even a month into the fall term. And I was coming back from class when I noticed the common room of my dorm was inordinately full for 9am on a weekday. Everyone was standing in shock watching the newscast. And not long after that, the second plane hit. I had to step outside to call my mom to let her know I was ok and ask if when heard from my aunt who was working in NYC. My mom had no idea anything was going on until I called her.
The next few days were surreal. Classes were canceled. And because of the schoolâs location within two hours of DC and a NASA test facility security was heightened - you could no longer just drive or walk onto campus without showing ID. My dorm mate who was from NYC became very withdrawn, then argumentative. Trips were flat out canceled as no one wanted to fly until they knew what the new airport security measures would be.
And when the security measures were finally in place the school decided it didnât want students flying for a while, for our own safety. It was like suddenly no one was safe anymore. People remember that day like those from previous generations remember where they were when JFK was shot or Pearl Harbor was bombed. It was fundamentally life-changing. America had never before been subject to a large-scale terror attack on her own shores. And 9/11 by that alone forever changed the American Psyche.
And of course, the Anthrax Scare was huge and came right on the heels of this big world-altering thing for us isolated and insulated Americans. Now even the mail wasnât safe anymore. The topsy-turvy just kept on coming.
After the attack, the Dow Jones suffered its worst one-day point loss and biggest one-week losses in history up to that point. So an economy that had been on the brink for years was overnight pushed to a breaking point. And before it had a chance to fully recover we were in one of the worst recessions most Americans will live through in their lifetimes. Â
My Dad had worked for the same company for over ten years at that point. It was a stable job until suddenly the recession hit and the company was no longer making the same insane profits that had them soaring through the â90s. The company was sold to a large conglomerate and people we knew were suddenly out of jobs. And this wasnât just happening in one area or industry, the issue was widespread.
The attacks on 9/11 were horrendous. The regular Americans who stepped up in their wake to do the right thing and help one another were heroes. But these events did not happen in a vacuum. They significantly impacted and affected everything that has come after.
