I was in college when 9/11 happened. A pretty shocking day all around but I had one experience that has stuck with me ever since. Just anecdotal and probably means nothing… but later in the day I went with a friend of mine into town to pick up some t-shirts for a school event. We were talking about it all when my friend said:
“It’s kinda weird but, I actually want the death toll to be higher”
For context, to this day my friend is one of the most ethical, good-hearted people I know. He’s also fairly non-political and definitely isn’t a “death to America” type. What he was telling me was a confession. He knew he wasn’t supposed to think like that, but his brain couldn’t help it.
And when I think back to the day it happened and shortly after when the death toll numbers were flying around… I feel like a lot of people felt like this but wouldn’t dream of verbalizing it. I think A LOT of Americans wanted to see a huge death toll and ultimately were a bit disappointed at the final numbers.
What this says about Americans if true… I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But it seems meaningful to me somehow and I’ve never quite parsed out what that meaning is.
I think it has to do with disasters as media events. In Debord’s words, we live in the society of the spectacle. We have learned not to experience calamities as the real life tragedies they are, but as shows, sporting events, blockbuster movies, and therefore they’re reported in terms of records - “yesterday we had the highest death toll in the pandemic!”
When I got home from school that day, the first thing my dad said was “they stole my idea!”
OMG this was my experience too.
“Doesn’t stuff like this happen all the time?” I had an anxious mother, and I was (surprise!) an anxious child.
I was oddly comforted that this was seen as uniquely bad - thankfully it didn’t make me more anxious… quite the opposite.
Really cool to hear someone else shared this reaction.
i also have a weird 9/11 memory. I was a kid. I remember wondering what all the adults were fussing about. I remember wondering “doesn’t this kind of stuff happen all the time?”
I had a similar response, I was in middle school and was bored by the news and didn’t get why it was interrupting class. I was just like, “Don’t way more people die in car crashes every year?” It seemed like the sort of thing that was on the news all the time. I think that was a completely reasonable response and I have yet to see any reason to change that perspective and seeing all the adults go nuts for no fucking reason over it definitely influenced by politics and my worldview. Of course, now we’ve got a 9/11 happening every day with Covid and the same people who went nuts don’t give a shit so what can I say, Boomers are truly mysterious creatures.
I have come up with a theory that the reason they reacted like that was that they were used to a Cold War mindset and fearing nuclear armageddon, and so when 9/11 happened it occupied that space in their heads of, “This is the big one.” Whatever the case they really fucked everything up with it.
