I feel like these takes are getting more unhinged with each passing month.
As a dirty zoomer yung’un, I keep hearing about people talk about what a “cultural shift” it was after 9/11 when everyone suddenly turned into turbo jingos. Is the Ukraine invasion sort of what this was like? Because now I’m watching white liberals absolutely froth at the mouth at the thought of dead civilians in a way I would have thought unthinkable 2 years ago
Sort of, except 9/11 was even worse. There was extreme anti-arab racism and Islamophobia. If you were arab you were a terrorist. It was all over the media. There were calls to ban burkas and Islam in schools and I recall hearing stories on the new of people going ip to Muslim women and ripping their face covers off.
Have you seen that episode of South Park with Osama Bin Ladin?
Socially yes, but 9/11 had much more institutional movement.
The patriot act was passed to legalize and publicize the spying they’d been doing
FISA courts, black sites, and NSA were made public knowledge
Airlines went from no security (my grade-school teacher brought a sword back on a plane) to banning non-ticket holders from going up to the gate and metal detectors to making you take off your shoes to banning liquids.
The tightening control on children since the 80s also kicked up a notch; cameras, metal detectors, school cops, students not being allowed to leave school during the day all became more prevalent.
There was a big shift in movies and country music, portraying a soldier or a cop in negative light used to be acceptable in fiction.
It was so comprehensive and massive it’s almost difficult to describe how all encompassing everything changing was…another point, during ‘the surge’ in 2004-ish, they started playing the anthem before every sporting event; iirc, that only used to happen sporadically beforehand (the department of defense paid a bunch of professional leagues to start doing it ‘to help recruitment’)
I was pretty young still but basically, yeah. I remember coming home to my parents crying and being like… you didn’t even know those people and strangers die all the time? It was very confusing. In my young mind, that’s just what the news was - a channel where you heard about which strangers dying. I didn’t get what made these strangers any different than the ones who died in fires or of starvation or from cancer, and I heard about those people on the news all the time.
And then what feels like the very next day, all of my little class friends were singing jokey songs about killing Osama Bin Laden in the cafeteria. Their liberal parents had flipped the script overnight and pretty much all of them followed.
But after a few years, the anti-war movement started to gain more steam. There were more dissenting voices back then in general, too. I think part of that has to do with George W Bush being the president… Imagine what liberals would say if Trump were still in office running this war and you’d probably have a pretty accurate depiction of liberals post-9/11. They hated the man in charge but ultimately the war itself could have been justified if it wasn’t for the guy perpetrating it. This became super evident when Obama was in office.
And then there’s the fact that Americans aren’t directly directly involved in this conflict. The narrative that this was an unprovoked war of expansion from Russia is a lot easier to sell when you don’t have a bunch of shellshocked veterans from the conflict lining the street corners of every major city.
And lastly, I think the post-Trump media landscape combined with two years of pandemic-fueled escapist fantasy has just left people a little disconnected from reality. It’s one big Marvel movie and Ukraine is just the current storyline. Biden won, fascism is over, hoorah, now let’s get back to the grill. It’s ideological booze - a way for people to numb their pain as a collective without actually having to examine the problems that drove them to the drink in the first place. You never have to feel bad if you never sober up.
I was pretty young still but basically, yeah. I remember coming home to my parents crying and being like… you didn’t even know those people and strangers die all the time?
I can understand being in shock because the significant destruction and spreading of carcinogens in a population center in a country that hadn’t suffered a notable attack since Pearl Harbor (I know there were some smaller terrorist attacks) can make you abruptly feel extremely unsafe. I do think the way people mourn it is a little strange because an outsized amount of the victims would have been finance ghouls (it was the “World Trade Center!”), though there were worthwhile people in the building and especially who died trying to help.
Oh definitely, but as a kid I didn’t understand any of that. It just felt like some arbitrary new set of social rules had gone into effect and only the adults got the memo. All of the information we got from our schoolyard peers was gossip passed down from the most vocal and reactionary parents, with maybe a tiny bit of pushback from the early internet dorks and the kids whose parents obviously had organic gardens.
