• abc [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    of course the actual lives lost in 9/11 was tragic, yes, but it is primarily funny (at least to me) because:

    A. its been 22 years and most Americans act like it happened yesterday

    B. We kinda had it coming (as a country, not saying the janitors or firefighters themselves did)

    C. Most Americans will get red in the face if they hear you say or do something even mildly neutral about 9/11. I had a teacher once scream at me in the hallway because I, as a high school senior in 2012, was like “the 8:46 announcement that ‘please take a moment of silence the first plane has struck the North Tower’ and the 9:03 announcement ‘please take a moment a silence the second plane has struck the South tower’ are ridiculous and literally just trauma porn & what is worse is that most of the student body doesn’t even have memories of 9/11” (the announcement shit was literally done like every 9/11 in my school district. Announcements for both planes striking the towers on the exact minute it happened as well as moments of silence during them. Every 9/11 was like this K-12 - ridiculous)

    D. I am kinda super biased against 9/11 in general because I for years, being biracial, had people call me a terrorist because in my 95% white town I was the closest complexion to middle eastern they’d ever seen.

    E. Uhhhh the War on Terror??

      • abc [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Yes lol. Mind you school started at 7:45, so we’d literally be like an hour into first period and it’d just come over the intercom but every one of the 3 schools (and these were separate middle/high schools. So like X North Middle/X South Middle/X East Middle and X North High/X South High/X East High all under the same district) in my school district did this shit.

        It was:

        • An announcement for the first plane hitting the towers. Moment of silence
        • An announcement for the second plane. Moment of silence
        • An announcement for when the first tower fell. Moment of silence
        • An announcement for when the second tower fell. Moment of silence

        No idea whose idea it was but we did this every year from like 6th grade to 12th & it was never really talked about in the community at large lol. Half the time, teachers would either just continue teaching through the moments of silence or get really irate at students who didn’t take it seriously. I experienced both over the years and senior year was when I was politically aware enough to realize how fucking stupid it was in general. Still one of those things though that is so clearly politically motivated that I didn’t even get in trouble for saying what I said - just yelled at by a chud whose coffee breath is still stuck in my memory - they were that close to me, for like 30 minutes in the hallway about how 2,977 people died and how it was disrespectful to laugh & call the announcements and moments of silence ridiculous (even though most of my classmates, even those who weren’t politically engaged or outright conservative, were of the same mind that it was pointless and dumb lol)

        • 4am@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Even in the Murica manga no one stops to mourn the pentagon lol

        • Water Bowl Slime@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          That’s really, really funny oh my god. At least your school district had the restraint to not force a moment of silence for the Pentagon too… or did they? 😂

        • jasondj@ttrpg.network
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          1 year ago

          To be honest this would be an incredible lesson one day, or even half day, in high school, once every 4 years or so.

          Not just moments of silence though…I mean every kid circled around every television-cart they could find, watching the real-time footage. Do a phone-check, too. Most people didn’t have mobile internet in 2001 (I did…it was slow as hell on some Ericsson bar phone…had a headset for it that was also an FM radio tuner. Found it on eBay. I was a nerd. And still am.)

          My high school still has teachers working at it that we’re teaching there in 2001. There’s even a few kids I went to school with teaching there now. I’m sure they could piece together a full-scale reenactment of the day from memory.

          • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            What lesson would kids gain from that which they don’t already know intuitively? Kids don’t need to be taught that senseless death is sad. The purpose of such an activity would be indoctrinating a sense of persecution in the citizens of the country with the most powerful military which has caused magnitudes more suffering than this individual event. Especially if you leave out the 20-year response by that same military to the event.

            • Water Bowl Slime@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              Kids can follow up that lesson with some Iraq war roleplay. One team of children gets to play as the US military and the other gets to be Iraqi civilians. They can finish the lesson once they play-execute Osama Bin Laden lol

    • ratboy [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Damn that part about having a moment of silence for when each plane hit the towers is…pretty ridiculous. I also don’t think we ever really had a moment of silence for it in school as I remember it, and I graduated in 2006. So I too would roll my eyes all the fuck back in my head if I were you.

      In terms of your bias due to profiling stuff, do you think it’s kind of a reactionary response after so much of that? Being like “fuck you, you are using this as an excuse to be a piece of shit, so I don’t care anymore”? I know someone else whose biracial and he was profiles like that and he suuuper doesn’t find it funny. Obviously everyone has different ways that they process that shit but just curious for curiosity’s sake. Also to be clear when I say reactionary I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, it would be super understandable

      • abc [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        In terms of your bias due to profiling stuff, do you think it’s kind of a reactionary response after so much of that? Being like “fuck you, you are using this as an excuse to be a piece of shit, so I don’t care anymore”? I know someone else whose biracial and he was profiles like that and he suuuper doesn’t find it funny. Obviously everyone has different ways that they process that shit but just curious for curiosity’s sake. Also to be clear when I say reactionary I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, it would be super understandable

        it is absolutely a reactionary response lol - I wouldn’t ever go to like a 9/11 memorial or something and be like “haha deserved” but 99% of my politics (maybe everyone’s to an extent) are because of how I grew up. My parents were/are the type of liberal that encouraged me as a child to ask about news/politics/etc and gave me my own computer with internet access at like 10, so as a consequence I was the outspoken atheist kid in middle school who was like “maybe the war on terror is kinda dumb??” in class to which my classmates would go “oh my god you are a terrorist” and I’d just laugh & agree with them.

        Literally still have a friend who I used to argue politics with all the time from like 7th grade throughout high school, who I’m sure the next time I happen to see him when I’m back home for the holidays will be like “what’ve you been up to you fuckin terrorist??” because of how it was always leveraged as an insult against me and, as a consequence of association, him too lol.

        One could probably argue that that type of stuff growing up (along with the other casual racism, etc) is what led me to immediately seek out left-leaning people in college, and because of that, discovered marx/etc so shrug-outta-hecks

        • ratboy [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Idk why I find that hella funny, maybe that’s me empathize with everyone who thinks a moment of silence for 9/11 is funny. I cracked the code!