Two months and change after the attacks, I fell out with a group of people on a different forum and IRC channel. I sent an email to two people I was still friends with, giving them a heads up that they weren't going to see me on the boards or in the channel anymore, and how I left before they could ban me for something they were blaming me for but didn't do. I also mentioned, probably against my better judgement, that a lot of people in the group's inner circle had been "really shitty to a lot of people since September 11th". This was an incorrect assessment of the situation; there was a two to three week period immediately after the attacks where people were actually trying harder to pretend to be nice to one another before the shock started to wear off, and everybody picked up where they left off before that day.
I stayed friends with one of the guys, and still talk to him today. I fell out of contact with the other one, and I would find out, years later, that he shared the contents of my email to him with the community. I didn't immediately hear about the outcome, but my remark about 9/11 was the one that seemed to stick in a lot of minds, as I would find out years later:
Sometime in 2010, I went back to the old haunt, and found out that their once thriving community was now a ghost town (everyone had moved to Facebook by then). The spammers had taken over the message board, and no effort was being made to do anything about them. I still clicked around and found this interesting post from late 2004 asked by some person who I didn't recognize, and he flat out asked if the whole group "was declining". The discussion began civil, but some of the aforementioned inner circle members started to go off on the OP and former members of the group who had either left on bad terms like I did, or wore out their welcome and were banned.
Inevitably, they started to attack me. Keep in mind, I had been gone from the place for three years at the time of the post. And one of the more hateful members of the inner circle flat out said "You know, Muncie Anderson said we kicked people out of chat because of 9/11", followed up by a few more posts attacking me for the horribly offensive and stupid thing that I didn't say.
9/11 was a pretty sore subject for a lot of people at my old haunt, and it wasn't just because of all the conspiracy theories that came out of it. Whatever, though.
