AIBU to ask you your opinion on 9/11 and millennials?

[CorianderDestroysFamilies]

I read a tweet this weekend that went - why do millennials complain all the time and the answer is basically because we saw 2000 die on tv when we were 10 and the world has got worse ever since.
Reading the following tweets made me realise that actually it must have had a massive effect for the mindset of that group, myself included, and I’ve never really thought about it - obviously more so for those in the US but even in the UK I remember seeing it happen and then it does feel like everything has just got worse. The war in Iraq, the demonisation of Muslims, so so many mass shootings and terrorist attacks, it sometimes feels like we’re sitting on the edge of the abyss. I know a lot of this is to do with non stop news and how small the world has become but it just struck a nerve with me.
One thing I read that I’d never heard about before was that Nick Jr and PBS in the US played cartoons all day to basically distract the kids whilst the adults took in what had just happened and that alone made me want to cry.
Anyway I’m not putting it very well but hopefully it’s makes sense as I just wondered what other people thought because I can lose myself in MN debates and there’s always angles that I’ve not thought about.

Yes more information - it's called Google darling. Bit easier than going down to the library and scanning old newspapers...

I bet you were chuckling away to your wee self with that comment weren't you? So proud of yourself thinking you're so clever and so superior to us mere mortals who didn't grow up with Google.

You can't think about anything you can't imagine, you dismiss and minimise swathes of history, and you write as though you're somehow superior because of access to information.

Yet that information appears to have made you close minded, incapable of empathy or understanding a point different to your own experiences and given you a superiority complex. So actually, it's made us go backwards in terms of societal progression. Oh the absolute irony

Oh and your wee swipe made me smile. I used to love the microfiche machine at the library in Edinburgh where I grew up, my mum used to let me disappear for hours on end trawling through old newspapers.

I loved it.

I actually think that sources pre google meant that we developed far better critical thinking skills.

We looked at where our information was coming from and therefore were better aware of bias.

BishopBrennansArse agreed.

I'm minded of the meme which explained to a time traveller that we all have little devices, within which is all the information available to humanity, but that it's mostly used for arguing with strangers (as demonstrated here ) and cat videos.

I got through school without Google. Which meant actually finding information, instead of just copying and pasting.

Without critical thinking, volume of information is useless.

The irony being that millennials didn't invent Google, or the internet, or indeed the tech that made it possible.

So they actually have previous generations to thank!

@ohcanada can you explain how millennials are more vocal about issues than previous generations please?

I wonder if maybe we are more effected emotionally by things which happen in our teens and early 20s because we are a bit more sensitive at that age.
To me who was an adult when 9/11 happened it has no special significance amongst all the other alfull things which have happened before and since.
I don't think it does any harm to protect ourselves emotionally a bit I watch the news on TV once a day and that's it I have had enough difficult stuff to deal with in my own life, sickness, bereavement. So if its the news and there is nothing I can do about it I don't need to watch more than once.

What is wrong with sourcing your own information 'darling'? I would rather do that than just take the Internet's word for it.

And yes, I remember being petrified about Chernobyl, AIDS and the IRA bombings. I was also working in London when 9/11 and the London July bombings happened. Watching them both unfold was awful, trying to find away to Charing X via the back streets was awful and then waiting and watching the news get worse on both days was horrible.
I am 42 and from Generation X apparently, none of that stuff was nice for anyone.
You don't get dibs on shit that has happened just because you can access it on your phone or computer

You don't get dibs on shit that has happened just because you can access it on your phone or computer

This!

I agree that people are mixing generations here now.
I am a millennial. Smack bang in the middle.

What many in here are talking about is the gen after us.

I'll make sure to let my MIL know that her experience as a five year old, of seeing her mother blown to pieces by a bomb at a tube station in ww2 and the six months she spent in hospital recovering from her own injuries followed by a lifetime of having that image in her head, are meaningless when compared to watching a news report, dreadful as it was, about people not known to you. I'm sure she'll appreciate that her life afterwards, was not impacted as negatively as those who Wat h some TV news.

I think it's also worth pointing out that for people like MIL, she nit only lived through that awful time, but she also remembers the fear from the time of the Bay of Pigs, tge Cold War, the troubles in Ireland , the Falklands, the gulf wars etc. Just as my generation were affected by some of those things and others such as Dunblane, Lockerbie etc. The thing is, we experienced all of those in that we lived through those times as well as 9/11. And most of those events also had long lasting effects.

Hear, hear.

My mum used to say: "If you don't stop crying I'll give you something to cry about."
I thought this was a threat of physical violence but it turns out her generation destroyed the environment and the economy.

My mum used to say: "If you don't stop crying I'll give you something to cry about."
I thought this was a threat of physical violence but it turns out her generation destroyed the environment and the economy.

I seriously laughed at that and now DH thinks I lost it😂

Ha ha ha.

This bothers me, because it feels like a selfish appropriation of personal traumas. It feels deeply self-serving.

^This.

You don't get dibs on shit that has happened just because you can access it on your phone or computer

^And this.

Millennials weren't the first to see coverage of terrible things in the media. But they were the first to be encouraged to actively participate and indulge in the feelings generated by those events, because social media is interactive, not just disseminating information.

This is kind of ridiculous when you consider what other generations have grown up seeing. The world wars, the blitz, the holocaust, the depression, the cold war, Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide... the list goes on. I don't understand the point of the tweet really? Like yeah 9/11 was truly awful, nobody denies that. But is it more awful than anything other generations witnessed? People do see and hear about events more today (because of the internet) but it's not like other generations would have been in any way unaware of what was going on in the world. In fact, a huge number of people would have been personally affected by some events - even hearing people's accounts of growing up during the Cold War make me feel anxious - must have been terrifying! So I don't think 9/11 can reasonably be used as an excuse to explain anything really.

I remember 9/11. I was 7 when it happened. Things changed. Friends pulled their children out of the Islamic school because people were vandalising it. Half of us stopped calling ourselves Muslim etc (we became people from a Muslim background for example) and the other half became more radical and started eating halal meat and forcing their children to wear hijabs. Traveling/being in crowded places became a risk assessment for my parents at least (this is a habit I have picked up from them). We were constantly told not to leave our parents/teachers sides. We definitely weren’t sent on long journeys alone or allowed to play with children our parents didn’t know on the street. We also viewed terrorism as fairly standard. It doesn’t really affect me when these things happen anymore. Unless thousands of people die i don’t react to it as a ‘proper’ terrorist attack. I am probably quite a paranoid person. The frequent terrorism has contributed to it (it’s nit the cause though but it puts an edge on being in public places). I would also attribute a degree of coldness to 9/11 and the attacks that happened in the years afterwards. I went through a major existential crisis as a teenager (as did many of my peers) and now I don’t allow myself to get over emotional. Unless someone has died it’s really not that bad. It’s not a bad thing but I suppose it’s a bit different to how I may have been if I hadn’t been exposed to regular news coverage of mass murder as a child. Maybe schools and parents should have tried to shield us a bit more instead of making us watch all that nonsense. I don’t mind though. Asides from being a bit jumpy (which was inevitable given my background, personality and the steady stream of dystopian fiction I read as a child - again, maybe 1984 isn’t the best curriculum material for children) I am fine, better perhaps for having grown up with terrorism as a norm 🤷‍♀️

@gigiandme other generations didn’t actually witness most of that though. 9/11 and the terrorism that followed was in your face. The news coverage was graphic and constant for weeks and weeks afterwards. We were set watching and regurgitating this stuff as homework. Obviously the war generation/generally anyone born before proper healthcare witnessed worse but the baby boomer generation onwards are soft. When I compare western baby boomers to my parents their ignorance is astonishing - baring the ones who went to Vietnam/Korea/whee politically very active and well travel, obviously soldiers and intellectuals are always an exception - the rest have clearly led extremely extremely sheltered lives.

@Gigiandme and obviously we’ve been plied with all the obscenely graphic footage/accounts that came out post Khmer Rouge/Vietnam. It’s like the older generation had less such sanitised lives that they felt they had to force all of this on us. It’s not a bad thing but it has had a profound effect and the later end on the millennial generation who grew up with regular terrorist attacks are quite different from older and younger people. A child can only watch so much overhyped media coverage of people being blown up before they snap a bit. It’s definitely improved but during the 9/11 aftermath it was like a mental illness of a societal level. The media would obsess over what happened. It was quite maddening.

@Cybergenesis that should be a meme

I was 6. Teachers were crying at school and it was put on the TV. We were sent home early.

I mean basically it means we're never lived in a world without the whole terrorism from the Middle East aspect. There are papers on the subject I think.

But I mean, generations riot had the IRA, space race, Korean War, Vietnam war, nuclear bombs, Chernobyl.

The only real difference is that we have the internet.

I am a baby boomer. I remember my 1st day at school. My next memory of school when I was 5 was of the school doing a fundraiser during school time for people dying of a famine somewhere, I don't know where. I saw photos of malnourished children. I remember feeling confused that children were dying because they did not have enough to eat. It was the first time I was aware that could happen.
I can not imagine that happening at school these days to 5 year olds. Can you imagine the AIBU if a 5 year old had come home from school having been taught about famine and seeing photos of malnourished children?

I remember being in London as a child and having to leave somewhere suddenly because of an IRA bomb threat, and then later as a teenager in Birmingham having to leave a train station hurriedly for the same reason. I remember coverage of 2 children who died who died in an IRA bomb that really affected me at the time as a child.

I remember the plane hijackings and ordinary people being shot. Being taught as a child about nuclear war and going on CND marches as a teenager. There was a low level background noise at the time that we were at real risk of a nuclear war. I remember the TV programme survivors which scared me at the time.

I remember a child in my class dying of cancer. No counselling then or even any explanation, we were just left to get on with it. My DP watched a friend die in front of him when he was 12 from an asthma attack, again no counselling or any real support.

I remember relatives talking about the holocaust and relatives who had died. I saw some of their photos and feeling a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach that maybe that could happen to me some day.

I remember at 16 my boyfriend at 17 going off to Northern Ireland and being afraid and then the Gulf war.

We all knew in my generation that we had it easier than older relatives who had fought in world war two or been in concentration camps. We all knew things could have been worse. But to pretend we never saw or heard horrors is simply not true. We did see see and experience far less horrors than a lot of humans today. That is because in spite of terrorism, we live in a very safe country at a very safe time.

"It’s like the older generation had less such sanitised lives that they felt they had to force all of this on us."

I can't begin to tell you how many kinds of wrong this is. The combination of historical ignorance and self-indulgent mememeism is absolutely staggering.

I can't begin to tell you how many kinds of wrong this is. The combination of historical ignorance and self-indulgent mememeism is absolutely staggering.

Well said.

I can't believe the shit some people are spouting here. I'm genuinely shocked that people are becoming this stupid.

I mean basically it means we're never lived in a world without the whole terrorism from the Middle East aspect. There are papers on the subject I think.

You think?

Posters who think terrorism from the Middle East started with 9/11 - Have you really never heard of the PLO, the Iranian Embassy Seige, Entebbe, Munich Olympic Massacre, Achille Lauro, Lockerbie, etc?
Any chance you could, you know, google it?