I just felt like getting some thoughts down on the 20th anniversary of quite possibly the most pivotal historical moment of my lifetime (and I’ve already been through a lot of pivotal historical moments in my short 35 years it seems). Just some ramblings and memories from that time, kind of a freewrite. I was living way over in California back then, 15 years old and had just begun my sophomore year of High School. Obviously being so far away from it I wasn’t directly affected, and neither was anyone I personally knew, but like everyone I was indirectly affected.
Anyway, I woke up at about 6am, as I normally did back then so that I could have a little time to myself before school. I would sit in my room and listen to the local student-run radio station 90.5 The Edge at the time. If there wasn’t a DJ in the studio (which there wouldn’t have been at that hour) it would just auto-play music with station bumpers in between. So I still had no idea what was going on that moment in New York, with no DJ to mention it. Anyway, I got to school, still not knowing anything was amiss, and I walked into my first class, English. And there it was on the TV. It felt like a movie. It was hard to believe that it was real. I still remember one kid in class was like “woah, cool explosion” when it showed a closeup of the plane hitting the building, and my teacher just snapped at him. “Cool?! You think this is cool?! People just died! The world is never going to be the same!” Poor dumb kid getting chewed out in front of the class. Anyway, we didn’t get any work done in that class, we spent most of it just staring dumbfounded at the TV screen.
Later on the principal spoke over the intercom in between classes, with a nervous chuckle, saying that despite recent events he saw no need to cancel school that day. Kids were booing at this. The chuckling just made me want to punch him in the face. The rest of the day was just kind of surreal; a lot of teachers just went through their lesson plans as if nothing unusual was happening and it was just a normal school day. The deaths of almost 3,000 people was relegated to an elephant in the room. I think that was the weirdest school day ever. They really should have cancelled school, everyone was too distracted to do or learn anything.
When I got home, coverage of the destruction was on every single channel. Even MTV and the Food Network, every channel. I remember the Chinese channel we used to get showed stuff the American channels weren’t showing, more carnage and people jumping from the buildings. Maybe that was the first time I realized that American media censors stuff. Anyway, in that moment I had the presence of mind to stick a blank tape into the VCR, do some channel surfing and record some of it, for the sake of historical preservation. The tape went from having old episodes of Family Matters, South Park and Celebrity Deathmatch to this. Symbolic of how this attack just abruptly came out of nowhere, destroying all normacy. After the footage the tape went back to normal, with Beavis and Butthead Do America on the tape. I still have the tape too, although I rarely have watched it since.
What happened after the attacks was disgusting, as politicians stoked fear for their own personal gains, encouraging extreme nationalism to push in the tyrannical Patriot Act which stripped people of their rights, and used the attacks as a pretense to start two wars, one of which only just ended last month. Maybe they knew the attack was going to happen ahead of time and they allowed it for that reason, or maybe they’re just hyper-opportunistic. It sure was convenient for them though. Bush Jr. wanted an excuse to invade Iraq to avenge his daddy, and here one came. Maybe I don’t believe the really crazy theories like there were bombs in the buildings and such, but I’m open to the idea that something else was going on behind closed doors. As an aside, I almost miss the 9/11 truthers, because as conspiracy theorists they were downright wholesome compared to the conspiracy theorists today.
It was a terrible time to look remotely Middle Eastern too. I’m just lucky I am white-passing, and the fact that back then I used my middle name Michael probably spared me too. That’s white privilege in a nutshell. I still got picked on for being short and just generally different, so it’s not like I had it easy per se, but race wasn’t ever a factor. I know a lot of darker Armenians were targeted by ignorant bigots who thought they were Muslims. Not that Muslims should have been targeted at all, but Sikhs, Indians, just anyone with darker skin was a target whether they were actual Muslims or not. Conservatives today try to push this narrative that everyone was united after the attacks, but that’s not how people of color remember it. It was a time of xenophobia and paranoia.
Another interesting thing to think about is just how the world changed after that day, and everything that’s happened since. It was kind of a loss of innocence moment for us 90s kids. There’s really a before and after when my generation looks back on their lives tied to that day. It’s a BC/AD moment. Things just seemed to get worse from then on. Maybe stuff like the 2008 economic crash, all the climate catastrophes such as hurricanes and fires, and the Coronavirus pandemic would have happened anyway, but the 1990s were a time of relative stability in the United States (obviously not everywhere in the world), compared to how the 21st century has played out thus far. That’s why millennials get nostalgic for the 80s and 90s. And it’s hard to be optimistic about the future at this point, so there is comfort in the past. 9/11 was kind of like the first step towards our disillusionment with the world.
Anyway, I will likely recycle these memories into my webcomic Alcatraz High, when it gets to that point. It takes place between 2000-2004, and is partly based on my own experiences in High School, but right now I’m still in September 2000. So it’ll be quite a while before I get to that part of the story. I had September 11th be my main character Harry’s birthday for a reason. I read some articles about those poor unlucky people who had that birthday in 2001 and was kind of fascinated by it.
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