As someone around for 9-11 and the "NEVER FORGET NUMBER #1 GREATEST TRAGEDY EVER IN HISTURY" response to it I am in thrilled and invigorated by the fact that younger people just make amogus memes and TikTok nonsense about it. A huge chunk of America cared more about it than any entire genocide and thought you would cry learning about it. They hoped it'd make every generation patriotically angry forever and ever and want to join the military. Instead you Photoshop the towers into squidwards house and shit. Never stop lol
I’m physically unable to take 9/11 seriously, entirely because my grade 9 english teacher was bizarrely obsessed with it. We basically had an entire unit on 9/11. We watched that documentary from those students that were doing a documentary of firefighters and wound up getting the only footage of the first plane hitting. We did a novel study of a book about some kid being in one of the towers for take your kid to work day and him and his dad squeezing past the wreckage of the plane to escape in time. We watched that Nic Cage movie of him being a firefighter during 9/11 that gets stuck in an elevator shaft when the place collapses. I am dead fucking serious, we had to make up fictional people that died in the attack, write an obituary for our 9/11sona’s, and then write and deliver a eulogy as their grief-stricken parent. At one point in the unit the teacher clarified that she hadn’t personally lost anyone to the attack, nor was she anywhere near New York when it happened. She never bothered to ask if any of us had actually lost someone in the attack, which kind of seems like a thing you should do before making us invent fictional victims to give eulogies for. The unit began with her demanding to know where we all were on the day of the attack and what we remembered, and she started crying when we told her that 1. we were two years old at the time and couldn’t remember shit fuck, the closest thing was one of the older kids kind of thought they remembered being very confused at adults freaking out over the TV but that could have been literally anything, and so this meant that 2. we were the last class she would ever teach that could possibly remember 9/11. Probably didn’t help that someone pointed out that we were the class born in 1999, so in two years she’d have students that hadn’t even been born during 9/11. That may have contributed to the teacher crying over the whole thing.
We’re Canadian.
That last sentence KILLED me. Jesus fuck.
Oh my god. I've never seen this post before, but I'd somehow still seen the phrase 9/11sona and been completely confused. I will now never be able to stop thinking about this post...
My experience with 9/11 as a person who didn't live through it is that every year of my primary + secondary education (except maybe 1st through 3rd?) at least one of my teachers would devote an entire lesson to how horrific 9/11 was. Now keep in mind, I have a severe anxiety disorder and autism. These lessons scared the shit out of me. Not because of a "patriotic sense of injustice", but because of how much emphasis was placed on how many people died. I was especially scared of that story about the third plane- I was genuinely terrified of the thought of a plane full of people knowing they were about to die and the fact that they kept the plane from hitting Washington D.C. did not at all make me feel better. And the thought of them calling their loved ones once they realized they were about to die? Terrified me even more because I couldn't stop fixating on how terrifying it would be to talk to a loved one knowing they were about to die. Then, in 8th or 9th grade a teacher said "Let's watch a video of the second tower getting hit!!" and I got scared before the video even started because here was this event I'd basically been trained to feel grief over (despite not being alive when it happened) and the teacher was about to play the footage of part of this event AS PART OF THE CLASS and for all I knew there would be an assignment on it. I left the class crying part way through the video because I couldn't watch the video without sobbing out of second-hand grief and anxiety.
