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.

No, I don’t think the generation who saw 9-11 as children experienced worse than previous generations. I grew up having nightmares for years about the threat of nuclear war, IRA car bombs, etc. My parents were children during the Blitz and had direct experience of their local area being destroyed, family and friends being killed. Another generation back they were sent to die in the first world war. And so on and so on back through history.

Indeed Alpen

In the 80s we existed under the persistent awareness of 'mutually assured destruction' (cold war nuclear apocalypse). 'Protect and survive' said the government (hide under the kitchen table until you die of radiation poisoning).

Then there was AIDS - 'don't die of ignorance' kids, here's a massive tombstone.

Locally, the IRA was setting bombs around the UK in places we all went to, walked past, or might easily go or walk past one day.

The sense of global, inescapable threat - to all of us, everywhere - as well as local menace, was real and palpable daily.

The end of the cold war, coming down of the Berlin wall (and success of the NI peace process) were a massive relief - to millions - east and west.

Yep, live aid, Bosnia....

Genuinely I think we've all had stuff happening through the generations it's just now we have to filter out the bullshit fakery as well.

If people think that 9/11 was the start of the fear of terrorism no wonder people are willing to be so free and easy with the Good Friday Agreement.

The Cold War wasn’t particularly optimistic either.

And we had events like Lockerbie and Dunblane.

@butters83 The tweet makes it a competition by saying seeing 9-11 is a uniquely awful event that made Millenials different to every other generation.
If the tweeter actually did not want this to be a competition, then they would have tweeted that children seeing 9-11 had a massive impact on a generation. The tweeter set it up as a competition.

Again lots of you are missing the point. It's not that millennials have seem worse it's just that quality of life has got progressively worse since then instead of getting better. Stagnant wages, unaffordable housing etc. Everyone has realised that the "work hard and you'll have a nice life" dream is absolute bollocks.

Bloody Savile on telly every Saturday night. Rolf Harris presenting kids tv programmes. Gross.

“Watching rich, white men continue to cause untold damage and being ridiculed for wanting them to stop. “

You’re being ridiculed for being a sexist racist, not for wanting to fight climate change.n

The world hasn't got worse , you just watch too much tv
You wouldnt have coped very well in the 1940s

@peachgreen - maybe they were positives if you were white. For me as a brown person whose parents were from East Africa, just learning about apartheid seemed to put kids into racial camps. Afro-Caribbean movements and centres in the UK started to exclude non-Black people, resulting in a whole group of Indian, white, and mixed race people getting their cultures invalidated. As for the fall of the Berlin Wall - Nazism came off the back of that. Within weeks we had, in our predominately Indian area at the time, entire gangs of skinheads trying to score points by running over people. The racism that resulted after 9-11 wasn’t new, all that changed was that the coward racists started attacking women and children too.

But during the 80s we lived in real and permanent fear of nuclear war - who has seen the doomsday shows 'Threads' and another one whose title I forget, but was genuinely frightening? 9/11 was a one off terrible event, but I am not sure it was worse than living under the shadow of war.

Everyone said work hard blah in the 80s but real life wasn't like that.

I was 10 when 9/11 happened. At the time I remember moaning beacuse CITV was cancelled and "what's the big deal, planes crash all the time". It was just something I grew up with that had happened and it wasn't until I was about 21 and actually read about it properly that I realised how bad it was if that makes sense. Until then it was just something that happened but until I learnt about it properly as a grown up that is when I realised the severity and full scale of it.

I always hear people say and have read it on there that 9/11 was the day the world changed forever and how they were terrified for theirs and their children's futures watching it all roll out on live TV. I can't imagine that fear and am quite glad I didn't have to experience it.

@nuttybutter What is happening is the erasure of the middle class. Working class people actually have it better than many previous generations. But the middle class are being slowly erased.

jennymanara I mean...the tweet was a joke but ok.....!

jennymanara BOLD TAKE haha

The work hard and have a nice life probably only related to the Baby Boomer generation.

I'm a baby boomer, not a millennial, but 9/11 had a huge impact on me.

It's my city that was attacked. I was about a mile north, watched the second plane hit and both towers fall. The fires burned for weeks and the whole of lower Manhattan smelled of burnt flesh for almost as long. I knew two people who died that day. That morning I couldn't even call DH to tell him I was okay as one of the other buildings that came down had the telephone exchange in it.

I think NYC was remarkably calm afterwards given the enormity of the event. All of us were affected, not just the young.

Throughout history theres been many atrocities.I don't think 9/11 was that special really.Look at Pol Pot, he killed more than the 9/11 bombers and that's been long forgotten.

You’re being ridiculed for being a sexist racist, not for wanting to fight climate change.n

What??

@Teddybear45 Yes a friend was targeted in their house by the BNP in the 80s. They ended up having to leave in a hurry after finding a car bomb under their car.

Yep the 80s EDL marches in Luton and other places too, plenty of hatred

I do think that Millennials (in general) are screwed financially and that 9/11 must have had a massive effect on them. However, I don't think that it was necessarily more scarring than slightly older people had to grown up with.

I was born in the 70s (Yes, I'm that old...)

We grew up with the Falklands War. It must be hard to imagine, but it was full scale battles being reported on the evening news. It was footage of battleships in flames, the carnage of Goose Green, and pictures of wounded British soldiers.

We also had the Miner's strike. My local area saw confrontations between police and strikers, my school had to shut because we had no coal, and kids in my class went on free school meals.

And we had a domestic bombing campaign by the IRA. Again, where I grew up there was real sectarian tension.

And don't forget the real fear of the USSR blowing us to bits. We watched educational films about what to do when the bomb dropped.

And then the utter utter horror of the footage of the war in the Balkans.

These were the realities of a child in the 80s and early 90s.

So we had a war, a hugely corrosive strike, bomb threats, being taught what to do if we had a nuclear holocaust, and a televised genocide.

I'm sure someone born in the 60s would have a list like this as well.

So I don't think that you can claim that you are a special generation when it comes to the affects of traumatic world events on your childhood.

@jennymanara actually I saw stuff that wasn’t age appropriate but my family felt it was culturally important. I assume you were a child in the post war era?

@UrsulaPandress It only related to certain type of people in the baby boomer generation. Not those with obvious disabilities, gay people, single mums, etc.