How old were you when 9/11 happened?
I was 14 (later on 1st October that year turned 15), you?
shareI was 11. My parents initially tried to shield me from it under the assumption that I would be traumatized, but really I wasn't interested at all. I was 11, I was interested in hanging out with my friends, watching Dragon Ball Z and playing game boy games. Plus, my dad was always watching true crime shows about murder, didn't care if I was in the room, so to me this was just more deaths of people I didn't know. I didn't see how it was any different than my dad's shows, other than the numbers. On an intellectual level I thought it was a sad thing and I pitied the people involved, but it didn't upset me personally because it was too distant for me to relate.
Also, I was unable to take it personally just because I happened to have been born in the same country as the people who died, and those who killed them were from a different country. To me, people killing people was all the same. As I say, I'd been seeing my dad's murder shows for years. I didn't see how a foreigner killing an American was worse than an American killing an American.
Later my parents tried to guilt me for that because I wasn't sufficiently patriotic. That was another thing. Like it wasn't sad that people died; it was sad that Americans died and it was foreigners that killed them. I never did get into that tribal mentality. Patriotism always seemed very abstract to me, I never understood why I was supposed to show reverence for the flag or treat the abstract concept of a country like it was an entity that I'm supposed to have a personal connection with, and the fact that it felt so forced and that I was pressured to care about patriotism and judge the value of people's lives based on where they happen to be born only made me more disdainful of it.
I didn't start becoming interested in the news, politics and world issues until a few years later, starting around 2004. If 9/11 had happened then I might have been more engaged with it, but I never would have gone in for the whole patriotic dimension.
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I've never thought 9/11 was a formative event for me in any way, but as I was typing my post here I thought back on it and I suppose it kind of was. This seems to be where my skepticism of American patriotism started. As I say, it always felt so forced and abstract to me and I was never able to relate to it, and the fact that our culture really tries to force it just frankly really made me disdainful of it.
What concretely did it for me, though, was what I said about how I could never get into judging the value of people's lives based on their national origin; that someone's death is more tragic because they were born here, and someone else's death is less tragic because they were born over there, on the other side of some artificial lines people drew on pieces of paper at some point, where they ended up by accident of birth.
I couldn't have articulated it like that then, in fact back then I was pretty silent about it all, but the concept always made me uncomfortable even though I couldn't express why. It would have been hard to do so anyway even if I did have the words, for fear of being misunderstood and sounding callous about the people who died.
But I think all this played into the eventual development of the socialist views I hold today. I've always leaned to the left and been skeptical of the whole right-wing way of thinking. This was probably a significant contributory event to my development along these lines.
By the way, given how I spoke of terrorist attacks that happened not only after 9/11 in my country, Russia, like the 2002 "Nord Ost" Moscow theatre siege and the horrifying 2004 Beslan school siege and others in between, but also those before, also in Russia, like the Budennovsk hospital siege crisis in 1995 and the 1996 Kizlyar-Pervomayskoye siege of also the main hospital there, I was kinda wondering...
What did Americans think and feel of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which although was far smaller on a grand scheme of things, still killed at least 6 people, and the April 1995 Oklahoma city bombing, which killed around 170 people, and is still considered to this day arguably the biggest act of DOMESTIC terrorism in American history, not counting 9/11 itself, which, although not a domestic one, is arguably considered the biggest TERRORIST act in America in American history?
Does anyone remember THOSE acts, and others, and maybe the aforementioned Russian ones? (On a side note, although some did, but based on some of my research, not everyone in America and other English speaking nations could say accurately PRONOUNCE the word "Budennovsk" when reporting the news about that town's hostage crisis back then, although UK ITN's news' correspondent Julian Manyon did pronounce it correctly but that's nit-picking and side notes compared to say the damages done of those terrorist acts itself.)
I do, every bit as bad. WWII and the Revolutionary War as well. Too many forget 1993 as the original World Trade Center bombing. 9/11 was a day when I remember 8 years before..
shareI think I understand a little of your thinking here,the terrorist attacks that have happened over recent times in the UK and other parts of Europe have been horrendous and naturally one feels sad for the victims and their families.However at the same time there were other acts of terrorism happening by the "so called" Islamic state in other parts of the world which were largely ignored by the media.From the point of view of how these events are reported,there is a definite assumption that European or American lives are somehow more valuable.
Generally speaking if a major event happens in the world,such as a plane crash,almost the first thing the British press notes is how many British victims there were.I understand this and I suppose it's natural but on the other hand it never fails to niggle at me that such importance is placed on some victims,as if the others don't matter or matter less.
Well, it COULD be the case, yes, but it wasn't necessarily what I was thinking, but perhaps with TIME it does become more NOTICEABLE here and there, you know, media flaws etc.
shareMy reply was meant for Kawada_kira sorry.
shareNo worries.
shareLet's also not forget how passengers on Flight 93 fought back against their hi-jackers, but that sadly did not prevent terrorists in the cockpit from crashing the plane and killing everyone on board. (I also recommend the very good movie "United 93" (2006) by Paul Greengrass about it.)
Eerily enough as a resemblance, there have been at least two cases of lynch mob justice in Beslan where a crowd had beaten to death at least two terrorists responsible for the mass atrocity.
"From the point of view of how these events are reported,there is a definite assumption that European or American lives are somehow more valuable."
Are you really that thick??? The big difference is that the victims in other parts of the world are from the same country and culture that have local conflicts that go back centuries. It's sad, but not exactly shocking. Then those terrorist freaks come to Europe and the US specifically to target people that have nothing to do with them. That's the disgusting and terrifying part you and wannabe Asian boy don't get.
Good god, you're a looney.
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