15 years on from 9/11

[TopCat]

It's been 15 years since the worst terrorist attack to occur on American soil. 2,977 people perished during the events of September 11 2001 when two airplanes crashed into and eventually destroyed the Twin Towers, two of New York's tallest buildings. A third plane was also flown into the Pentagon, killing 184 people.

15 years on, the effects of the day are still being felt around the world and the attack remains the deadliest act of terrorism to occur in the United States to date. 9/11 is seen as a day that changed the world, so with this in mind what are all your thoughts on it 15 years later?

 

[vertexwindi]

It was a horrible event but there've been plenty of attacks since, including ones with bigger body counts, yet they don't get nearly as much attention. I'm honestly scared that it'll become an event that will remain in the public's conscious a century from now.

 

[alex_theman]

Its not 9/11 yet!

 

[Chicken Nugget Scoon]

Never Forget.

 

[Quijibo69]

Happy Birthday, 9/11!
I remember I didn't know about it until about noon that day. In the mornings in high school was a working a internship type thing until about then.

 

[Pepsi-Cola]

The incident was horrible but I believe the aftermath was worse.

 

[Ravenor]

I'm english as most of you know, but I can recall 9/11 with clarity, I was sitting outside a shop popular with my friends at the time and then along came Kelvin - "Mate some one has bombed New York" so I sit around for a bit an go home and walk in an say "Hey turn on the news some one's bombed...." My Mum, Dad, Sister and Aunt where watching BBC news and I saw tower two collapse.

 

[melty]

It was a horrible event but there've been plenty of attacks since, including ones with bigger body counts, yet they don't get nearly as much attention. I'm honestly scared that it'll become an event that will remain in the public's conscious a century from now.

What attacks? I'm pretty sure it's the largest terrorist attack by far.

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

It was a horrible event but there've been plenty of attacks since, including ones with bigger body counts, yet they don't get nearly as much attention. I'm honestly scared that it'll become an event that will remain in the public's conscious a century from now.

Why shouldn't it? It was the first time someone dared attack the US since Pearl Harbor.

 

[RJ MacReady]

It was a horrible event but there've been plenty of attacks since, including ones with bigger body counts, yet they don't get nearly as much attention. I'm honestly scared that it'll become an event that will remain in the public's conscious a century from now.

It wasn't the body count. As I see it, it was two things: the first was the pure violation and horror of an international symbol of American culture and influence (the skyline of New York City) being blasted apart in broad daylight in front of hundreds of millions of people. There was (and still is) no precedent for that kind of peacetime destruction in the entirety of American history. 9/11 is the terrorist attack and spelled the end of the American public's overall contentedness in the power and status the U.S. had enjoyed as the world's only superpower since the end of World War II.

The second was that there was a visible, tangible entity to blame: Al-Qaeda. Had 9/11 just been a lone wolf attack by some anti-government loon from a flyover state, the aftermath wouldn't have been as severe (and contained to domestic measures) because there would've been nothing material to declare war on. With Al-Qaeda, Bush could point to the Middle East and say "These guys attacked us!" And really, what's more galvanising to the general public than the notion their country was just raped by a hostile, foreign entity? Nobody escaped the bloodthirst and war fervour of the early 2000s.

The only possible way for 9/11 to be overshadowed is the detonation of a nuclear weapon on American soil. That's the only barrier which hasn't yet been crossed. If that doesn't happen, yeah, 9/11 will be remembered for more than a century. It marked an exact moment human history was totally and irrevocably changed forever. There was the French Revolution, there was World War II and then there was 9/11.

 

[vertexwindi]

What attacks? I'm pretty sure it's the largest terrorist attack by far.

I could've sworn I heard somewhere there were bigger attacks but it seems, after trying to find them, that I was mistaken.

 

[Cosmos]

Seriously, people who don't understand why 9/11 still deeply impacts the American psyche don't really understand the American psyche itself. Americans have always had a sense of invulnerability; not only are we an extremely wealthy and powerful country (arguably the most powerful country to have ever existed), we're extremely geographically isolated from the rest of the world save for Canada and Mexico. While the European psyche was deeply scarred by WWI and WWII, America remained relatively unscathed (aside from Pearl Harbor). The last war we had on our soil was the Civil War and it happened well over a century ago.

9/11 was (and is) such a huge deal because it was the first time most Americans felt a sense of vulnerability. The World Trade Center was a symbol of our economic might, and terrorists completely razed it to the ground. Plus, remember, while Pearl Harbor was a big deal, it targeted a military base. The 9/11 attacks struck a civilian target and all those who perished were civilians or first responders, not military personnel.

I agree that we shouldn't make an enormous deal about 9/11 and that the War on Terror has been a total clusterfuck, but it honestly pisses me off to see people try to brush it off and claim that Americans are overreacting. I mean, 3,000 people died; even the most horrific terrorist attacks since rarely break triple digits (thank God). Plus, you have to remember how shocking it was that the attacks utilized planes; before that point, nobody ever considered airplanes being used as weapons (I mean, there were kamikaze pilots, but that was decades ago).

Oh, and I came across this clip a while ago that really reminds you of the horror, shock, fear, and confusion that 9/11 caused. It's a video that two college students shot from their dorm. It starts up in the aftermath of the first strike, when people were still thinking that it could have been a horrible accident. Then the second plane strikes and all hell breaks loose.

 

[exball]

It was a horrible event but there've been plenty of attacks since, including ones with bigger body counts, yet they don't get nearly as much attention. I'm honestly scared that it'll become an event that will remain in the public's conscious a century from now.

Is this bait? 9/11 is pretty much one of the only attacks on American soil in most of the currently living populations memory.

 

[Brandobaris]

before that point, nobody ever considered airplanes being used as weapons

Actually several think tanks tasked with predicting future Terrorist attacks and how to prevent them produced a report for the Government suggesting Civilian Aircraft would be used as a means to conduct attacks similar to a missile.

 

[Flowers For Sonichu]

Jet fuel can't melt Steel beams but the chemicals in the Jet used to make chemtrails can

 

[Ravenor]

Seriously, people who don't understand why 9/11 still deeply impacts the American psyche don't really understand the American psyche itself. Americans have always had a sense of invulnerability; not only are we an extremely wealthy and powerful country (arguably the most powerful country to have ever existed), we're extremely geographically isolated from the rest of the world save for Canada and Mexico. While the European psyche was deeply scarred by WWI and WWII, America remained relatively unscathed (aside from Pearl Harbor). The last war we had on our soil was the Civil War and it happened well over a century ago.

I think that's why the reaction a lot of americans had was so viceral even if it was the other side of the country to them, America is uniqe in the fact they are a nation as large and as powerful as they are that's never had conflict with a foreign country on it's own soil, you have essentially got Ned Flanders to the North and Bumblebee man to the south.

But in europe it's still in living memory a time where people carried around gas masks as part of your daily life and the scars are still very visible on the landscape, America has never really had to deal with that, I can recall seeing a clip from American news that summed up the American reaction to 9/11 and that was a single line "The day the innocence died", before 9/11 America had never really had anything happen to them like that before i.e. some one come in from the outside and turn things on their head, in the rest of the world that was a fairly common occurrence and if we hadn't experienced it our selfs we at least had a group understanding of how things like that happen.

that the War on Terror has been a total clusterfuck, but it honestly pisses me off to see people try to brush it off and claim that Americans are overreacting. I mean, 3,000 people died; even the most horrific terrorist attacks since rarely break triple digits (thank God). Plus, you have to remember how shocking it was that the attacks utilized planes; before that point, nobody ever considered airplanes being used as weapons (I mean, there were kamikaze pilots, but that was decades ago).

It has been a cluster fuck but I don't think America can be considered by anyone in there right mind to be over reacting to the events of that day not only was it the end of americas innocence, it was the largest single number of deaths caused by terrorisim in a single event ever throughout the whole of human history.

Also using planes as weapons was uniqe but the idea oddly was thought up by the IRA in the 70's but they dropped it for various reasons, before 9/11 I can recall the security measures at airports mostly being focused on certain kinds of threats, but they where still reasonable now it's essentially just short of a proctology exam going through any American airport.

 

[Carlos Thin]

15 Years and it's still as good as ever

 

[SP 199]

15 years and america is still using it as a club on the middle east

 

[TheImportantFart]

My Mum said that she was watching news about the attacks on TV and they had footage of the towers falling. My brother, who was a toddler at the time, was playing with Duplo on the kitchen floor. When he saw the towers being hit by the planes and falling, he started making a Duplo tower and smashing a Duplo plane into it. He had no conception what was going on - innocence is such a wonderful thing.

 

[feedtheoctopus]

I grew up in a neighborhood filled with first responders and people who lost loved ones. You can play six degrees of death with everybody you meet in the place. That's not interesting other than that I've grown to detest people who abuse that event for political ends more and more. I can't attach it to nationalism or some sort of false unity and militarism like so many are want to do. It was a pure tragedy, and as a nation we responded in the worst possible way to it. We let our fears and anger lead us into increasingly dark places. Now we're stuck in it, and we're never going to leave until it consumes us.
I never really know how to work out my feelings on this particular day. I see all the memorials on TV, I got friends and family talking to me about so and so's respiratory problems and how they still think of the whole thing and...I don't know, fuck? Just...fuck. Maybe this is hard for people on the other side of the country to truly comprehend. New York as an entire city went through something that is purely and simply incomprehensible. The sheer magnitude of human suffering that persists in the place. And it's just...there. Floating around the place. Inescapable. Imagine seeing the explosion that killed your son playing on repeat minute after minute on every TV station in America every 9/11. Or maybe that clip where he decides to jump to his death rather than burn alive? Maybe him choking to death on dust in the street? A dog dragging his bloated corpse out of rubble days later..

When we shot Bin Laden in the face I couldn't celebrate. Not that I miss the fucker. But I looked around me and I just thought "what now?". Because it never ends. None of this ever ends. In the past 15 years we've piled up suffering on suffering, we betrayed pretty much every value we claim to believe in. We have had an endless succession of politicians promising us "never again" and putting forward their latest 5 point plan for "security". But it's never enough is it? It's all futile. And none of it is ever going to heal that particular wound.