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.

Pivot that was my experience too.

Also, I remember cartoon network etc playing cartoons all day in the late 90s, before 9/11 happened.

@fancynancyclancy I think being forced into a mental hospital because you are a lesbian is a worse experience than not being able to buy a house personally.

Yes social media has brought benefits and real negatives which I think is something most parents are well aware of.

Both my parents were born during the Great War, grew up during the depression and were young - and fighting for their country - during WWll. They saw the creation of the welfare state and the beginning of its destruction. I’d say most people alive in this country today have had life easier than they did.

Hmm I grew up during Chernobyl and AIDs......

Also, being afraid of suspicious looking packages and watching the aftermath of bombings in Hyde Park, Harrods, Brighton Grand, Enniskillen and many, many others.

24/7 Rolling news might not have been a thing, but even back then broadcasters would take over the channels with live news from the scene, and for days the newspapers were full of very graphic pictures.

Generations before me lived through the fear of the Cold War, the Blitz, losing family in the war, being evacuated etc.

Why pretend millennials have it worse?

Do not give out any information on this thread.

Anything.

It is a mine crafting thread.

Yes I believe it has all made a difference to current young people and will beyond that The world has become an angry place. Everyone angry about something or being offended by something. Threats to safety no matter where you are really, companies collapsing and jobs with them, pensions no longer really something to rely on in old age, housing, minimum wage etc.. A part of me can often understand why young people are living for today and not saving for tomorow. They feel they live in a world where there may not be another day to have.
I have three kids and worry all the time and part of me wonders what their world will be like at my age and if they will even want to bring kids into it.

I recently the autobiography of an Austrian Jewish man who was born in the 1880s and died in 1941. Now there was a generation who really experienced a lot of hardship. WW1, hyperinflation, mass unemployment and then the Nazis. Life just kept throwing shit at them.

@placemats have you RTFT?

OP hasn’t mentioned children.

I remember 9/11 clear as day - I watched the live coverage on tv. I was 7 and had been picked up early from school for a dental appointment. I remember seeing the coverage of the first plane hitting, then my Nan suddenly piped up and said “omg there another plane!”, and my mum told her “no....that’s just a replay of the first one surely?” - then it clicked that no, it was in fact another plane, this was far from an accident and we were watching it unfold on live TV. I remember being shocked by it, and quite scared when I started seeing people jumping to their deaths but I didn’t fully understand what was happening until later on when the U.K. followed Bush into the Middle East, two of my cousins deployed and my mum explained to me then why they had to go and I was terrified. Then I joined the army at 16, did my bit in Afghanistan at 18, then married my military DH who’s undertaken numerous deployments that could all be classed as a direct result of 9/11.
So yeah. I’d say 9/11 did have a pretty major impact on my life in the long run, even though I was only a child when it happened!

Every generation has it's challenges, the huge difference between a significant percentage of (not all) millennials and previous generations is resilience.

I do agree that all generations have suffered. I think the difference is that they had hope and came together to help each other. Now everyone is pitted against everyone else and afraid to speak out. Everyone keeps themselves to themselves.

I am a millennial and I really don't think 9/11 had as big effect as some seem to think. And I watched the second tower go down live on TV
And before you say "See, you remember it though, so it made an impact". I remember equally clearly buying a watermelon by the road when I was 8🤷

Yes. It did change the world, but I don't agree that seeing it on a tv did something to us. It's the aftermath with wars, not the event itself imho

I also don’t by the “millennials are whiny” line. A casual listen to any mid-morning radio show will tell you that there’s none more moany than retired old boomers...

I agree with this. The same is true of entitlement. The baby boomers have generally been the ones who benefitted most over the last few decades since the late 70s but dare suggest any change to pensions and they trot out the “We’ve worked hard all our lives” line. As if today’s millennials, and even the previous generation, haven’t and won’t work hard but end up with less.

Haven’t they said the millennials are the first generation who aren’t guaranteed generally to be better off than their parents. If they do whine (and I don’t buy that) I’m sure they have some things to whine about.

@jennymanara stop @ me you 🍩. I’m outta here.

I think the difference is that they had hope and came together to help each other.
Sadly that is not true. What you are talking about are Government myths of the time.

@TheFridgeRaider that’s the entire point of the tweet! Not 9/11 itself but that everything is gone to shit after it!

but it will be mainly western centric when we are talking about OUR experiences

@Placemats - are you drunk?

@rosy71 my school showed it (I assume because the adults wanted to know what was going on) until our parents came to get us.

My mum was desperately trying to get hold of relatives and knew I was safe in school so came to get me at normal time.

I can't imagine they'd show it now and my mum was horrified that i'd seen it all. If you read the twitter thread almost all of the people who were kids at the time watched it in school.

9/11 in New York was certainly visually impactful, widely broadcast and never forgotten.

In the 1990s, war in the former Yugoslavia provided some visually impactful, widely broadcast, never forgotten images.

The Rwandan genocide...

The 1983-5 Ethiopian famine was visually impactful, widely broadcast and those images are never forgotten.

In the 1970s, Pol Pot and his 'Killing Fields' in Cambodia was visually impactful, widely broadcast and never forgotten. (Piles and piles of skulls, that had, very recently, been murdered people).

To me, as a child, this was all the more deeply shocking (thanks Newsround) when I saw images of the houses these people had lived in - modern houses like ours. Modern, sohpisticated people, just like us.

And so it goes back. And so it goes on.

So annoying all these posters saying 'well the 60s/70s/80s were worse'

I was 10 when it happened and I remember it so well. My childminder had it on her telly when we got home from school as she was due to fly to America later that month and she wanted to see if she'd still be able to.
Anyway, me and brother just sat there watching the horror.

Then there was the war on Iraq and being 10, I thought it was going to be a world war. It was scary. Then as you all say, it's got worse and worse and it's rammed down our throats all the time!!

None of us are very well off, we all have degrees which are sort of worthless, many can't buy a house, there probably won't be a state pension when we finally finish working our bums off earning less and less as the cost of living gets higher and higher. And any downtime we get, is spent looking at the news and seeing mass shootings left and right and Brexit BS. What a time to be alive!!

For me (and I was born in 85 so prime millennial material) I would say the two events that really shook me and changed my world view was Dunblane when I was 10 - I can remember the next day all the doors suddenly had locks on them and everyone was more sombre and I can remember my mum and most other mums were really slow leaving the playground that day. The other was, of course, 9/11. They were huge in terms of the media response and the way the world changed, both in terms of the way certain groups were viewed and the way that media like TV shows and films immediately changed - you can see pre and post 9/11 really easily - just as you can see pre and post French Revolution in books from the late 1700s/early 1800s.

Every generation has its own grim events. As others have pointed out this one has nonstop access to present day ones. Growing up in the 60s there was the bbc news and the daily paper and that was a about it. No chance of seeing people hurl themselves to their deaths on twitter or YouTube. It’s impossible and crass to compare events and try to establish which is the most traumatic/horrific. A child with radiation burns naked and running through the streets of Hiroshima -v- a woman throwing herself to her death out of the stricken World Trade Centre? Both unutterably, equally terrible. The difference for this generation is there was little escape from the images of 9/11.

Millennials only think in financial terms. Everything is about what things cost.

They don’t bear in mind that they live in a time where a lot of serious diseases have been wiped out, where medical science has enabled them to live longer healthier lives than ever before.

They don’t think about how safe they are. They haven’t had to go to war or live with the fear of being called up to armed service.

They don’t think about how they are free to live without persecution for their race or sexuality, previous generations had nowhere near the same freedom of thought and personality.

The cost of houses really isn’t the meaning of life.

I think something that has changed the world for worse, is social media. It has changed people psychologically so they see their peers as competitors/followers. People don't give as much of a shit anymore about the well-being of others because it feels much better to see a person's downfall than to see someone more successful than yourself. People didn't used to think like that but social media has warped people's minds. This has been far worse to society than any traumatic news coverage. Unfortunately it will probably take a long time until this is recognised for what it is.