Did anyone but me not care when 9/11 happened?

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It didn't really faze me, because I was used to hearing about wars and violence on TV every day in places where I've never been and don't know anyone. That long list of places includes New York.

Unless you directly knew someone involved in the attacks, I don't understand the long-running public outrage. It was hardly as major or surprising an event as our sensationalistic media made it out to be.

What? I suppose some people can be desensitized to the extent of being unsympathetic.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZMAUaUWCoY[/youtube]

I do care, regardless of how heartless so many of the members of WP appear to be when they are setting their minds in argumentation mode alone.

It was an attack directly on the mainland United States. I certainly cared and that day it seemed like they might get the whole country.

It was a terrible act, and I am only surprised that the war that followed was so minor.

Its not the first one though, merely the most successful, and certainly not epic enough to be "getting the whole country". In fact as an attempt to topple a whole nation it was remarkably poor. The volcano in Iceland caused more disruption to air travel than 9/11 and for longer. Had Mt St Helens blown its top, it would have probably had a greater effect.

The reason that the war that followed it was so "minor" is because it was committed by terrorists of no particular state as such. There was no real conventional target to counter-strike. Afghanistan seems to have been picked merely because it was a weak (conventionally) fanatical Muslim state. Iraq after that was a similar target. One that wouldn't be defended by the whole Muslim world. Its extremely noticeable that most of the biggest targets, which could actually pose a serious threat over a large sphere of influence remain unmolested.

Its likely that some people are a little less excitable about 9/11 simply because they have lived with the threat of terrorist attacks for years. That's certainly the case in the UK anyway.

That's not to say that it wasn't a horrific event.

For most of people in America, it is rather calm and peaceful most of the time, unlike in most of the middle-east and apparently also the UK if not other parts of Europe also. When an attack occurs, we tend to become shocked as a realization of "there's the rest of the world out there, and some of them have demonstrated that they want to kill us." I suppose the OP just was desensitized due to his pre-existent knowledge of the violence in the rest of the world.

I am sure there are some riders on the Underground who do not have your calm attitude.

Wait until someone near and dear to you is slain by a Jihadi maniac. Then we shall we how calm you really are.

ruveyn

Afghanistan was picked because the Taliban regime was harbouring Osama Bin Laden and was a safe-haven for Al-Qaeda. There was less of a reason to invade Iraq.

I can tell you by first person experience that Americans were NOT calm after Pearl Harbor. We went batshit crazy. What started in Hawaii ended in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The Japanese became the most despised creatures that ever were. Americans barely acknowledged that they were human beings.

ruven

Agree 100%.

I was in early elementary school when it happened. And at most I was just afraid that I was going to die in a war (this probably an effect of not being told anything about 9/11, because it's best to hide things from children amirite?) War was just something that happened. In school we always read accounts of children, oftentimes during a war some place else. It didn't seem so farfetched with the limited knowledge I had that I was probably going to be in the middle of a war soon.

It doesn't really matter to me because it was a long time ago, and I'm not related to anyone who died during it.

Yes, quite calm. I live at the centre of a national rail hub that's been threatened on numerous occasions. I have friends in places that have been bombed, and have narrowly missed being bombed on a couple of different occasions.Got a lot of good mates who served and died in Northern Ireland, and subsequently in other "terrorist" warzones. Not to mention having to fly home from an Arab nation on Sept the 13th on a 757 over every major European landmark you might want to fly a plane into, including such notables as the Houses of Parliament and the UN building in Brussels, not to mention all those US bases when every single jet-jockey and SAM site was primed to go at the drop of a hat. An Arab nation where the locals were quite literally dancing in the streets (and the clubs..to We are the Champions by Queen...) and the airport security is absolutely laughable. An Arab nation where the only news coming in was in arabic. Still calm though.

Seriously, its something you become...if not immune to, then certainly prepared for and aware of. If I have any ire at all it is at being dragged into this conflict by our horrible habit of following the Americans around like a lost puppy. I have anger towards our old Government for getting us caught up in such stupid bloody wars, and yes, I even have anger for the true religious fundamentalists who refuse to read their own bleeding holy texts properly and think that terror attacks are somehow beneficial to their cause. Don't see why i should harbour vitriol against a whole religion for the actions of a few morons, be they a crazy Imam in a cave or a Texan with learning difficulties in a mansion, or a grinning maniac in a town house.

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09-11-2001 was a senseless massacre of about 3,000 innocent Americans: men, women, and children.

It was equivalent to lining up 3,000 innocent American citizens from all walks of life and shooting them in cold blood for sport.

The problem with 09-11-2001 is that the foreign politicians (criminals) behind the attack (Bin Laden, etc.) wanted to repeat the massacre if they could get away with it.

For the most part, 09-11-2001 was not sensationalized at all by the news media - at least on the day it occurred.

If a person carefully looks at who were killed on 09-11-2001, they can likely find some sort of linkage to something they cared about even if it meant the killing of an executive producer for a major Hollywood TV series which almost everyone found entertaining and enjoyed.

The Pentagon was also attacked. 09-11-2001 was not limited to the city of New York, New York.

Part of 09-11-2001 was believed aimed at Washington, D.C. too, but that part was not completed due to action by passengers on a third jet.

If you ever go an airplane flight and dislike being searched and being asked to remove your shoes to go through security, blame it on 09-11-2001.

If you dislike the delays at an airport, blame it on 09-11-2001.

Prices for certain products in the USA have gone up due to 09-11-2001.

People may think that 09-11-2001 did not affect them at all but if they look close enough, 09-11-2001 likely has.

Part of the outrage is that 09-11-2001 can still happen again, unfortunately, due to a mindset which is common in the middle east which (falsely) promotes the use of violence on innocent persons as being a good and moral thing (which it is not). On the contrary, it is evil.

@ in bold: The shoe thing occasionally happened beforehand, and got more intense after some a***hole made a shoe-bomb, which came AFTER 9/11. Even more delays after some other a***hole made a liquid bomb. And delays in airports were happening long before 9/11, as were hijackings and planecrashes and almost every other element involved.

Bin Laden isn't a politician. It wasn't just Americans who died.

I'm intrigued by the "price rise" part though. What items are those?

It is people like you that made Neville Chamberlain seem the very essence of good calm common sense. If people like you and Neville had their way back in 1940, I would be having this conversation with you in German.

ruveyn

I wasn't arguing against that. However, prior to the attack upon Pearl Harbor, the United states was set to just live in isolation (based upon what I've read about history anyhow.) In November 4th 1939, the United States even signed a Neutrality Act which said we wouldn't supply weaponry to Britain or France except upon a commercial basis only. Such was the same day the Germans started rounding up people in Warsaw based upon their genealogy. If it weren't for the attack upon Pearl Harbor, then there may not have been the concerted effort of the Allies to rid the world of the Nazi war machine.

LOL. Even the threat of imminent invasion by all the screaming hordes of Islam isn't going to make me any less calm. Not that Islam is interested in the conquest of the whole world. Islam isn't even a cohesive single religion, and clearly YOUR solutions are not stopping it anyway.

Utilizing common sense is a bad thing now? As opposed to bombing back to the stone age anyone who catches you with your collective pants down? Where has reacting with no sense and lunatic rage actually got the US? Have you crushed Al Quaeda? Have you "got" Bin Laden? Is the world a safer place? Is the US or its citizenry LESS likely to be attacked? Doesn't look that way.

You could have "got" Bin Laden just by paying off the right Afghani tribesmen, if you had been stomping around raging.

And I'm pretty sure that Chamberlain would have approached any activity quite calmly. Dealing with Hitler as a gentleman and fellow statesmen was perfectly sensible and completely understandable after the horror of the first war, and falls foul only of Hitler being an unpredictable nutjob. Nobody could have foreseen that. And at no point did Chamberlain offer up the sovereignty of the British Isles, so we wouldn't have been "talking german" anyway. Its not like we were in danger of talking in German AFTER Dunkirk either. In fact the UK was never under any real threat of invasion at any point during the war.

I did care intellectually. I don't know if I felt anything, though. I was a very cynical 15 year old and I was resisting the idea of being manipulated into feeling something by what felt like a highly media-focused event. I know better now, but I would have perhaps felt more if I just read about it in the newspaper. It was like being at funeral of someone you never knew, and everyone around you was crying. 9/11 outrage was a communal emotion and I sometimes just shut down when everyone else is feeling a certain way.