this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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The day-of, I just remember my teacher being out in the hallway on the phone for like 30 minutes, then an announcement was made over the intercom that parents would be picking us up. I didn't know what happened until I got home. Then we just watched news replay the towers getting hit over and over for a few days.
A few years later, I remember being instructed on coloring in an outline of the country of Afghanistan (joke here about Americans only learn geography from war) and the teacher told us if we wanted to draw a bomb or something in the air above it, that'd be okay. Shit was absolutely fucked. I remember having a mock vote for Kerry v Bush and I was the only kid who didn't vote Bush and the principal called my parents to collect me from school for the day.
That shit was a core memory for me, too - I was in middle school when 9/11 went down, and high school during the Iraq invasion and war. I remember feeling weird about signing up for selective service (it’s a compulsory holdover from the draft era, if you aren’t aware), and being moderately concerned that I’d be plucked for deployment to the Middle East if some political dipshit decided they needed more meatbags for the grinder. It absolutely sped up my political coming of age.
Side note: I now struggle to take the popular outrage at the event seriously, in light of the fact that during peak covid, there were a couple weeks where we were losing a 9/11’s worth of people across the US every single fucking day. Call me callous if you will, but the popular reaction to that of “fuck you I won’t wear a mask or get a vaccine but I’ll inject bleach and take ivermectin” kind of broke me in terms of having any faith whatsoever in the broader American populace. Huge swaths of my countrymen don’t give a single shit about anything unless it either affects them very directly, or it’s a splashy MCU-esque story.