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.

I'm a millennial and I think that tweet is self-pitying garbage.

The oldest millennials will turn 40 next year. They weren't all 10 at the time. I grew up in Belfast, with actual shit happening. It didn't psychologically disable me. The population of the UK actually lived through WW2, on their actual streets, seeing and hearing bombs hit and body fragments scattered and, for a while at least, thinking that foreign armies would be landing on their soil. I'm not saying that that time was definitively worse than now, but the idea that this time is uniquely awful is just ridiculous.

There are and have been economic challenges. We're seeing the functional limits of the idea that living standards can just go on climbing forever. But the long term trend is indisputably upward.

@placemats not even the Internet seems to know what you’re talking about!

@ghostyslovesheets you’re right. The Spanish flu was no picnic either.

What parent would let their 10 year old watch people dying in 9/11? Bloody irresponsible. Shit things have always happened and will continue to happen. It's the parent's role to shield children until they're old enough to understand things. If you're messed up, it's because your parents screwed up. Probably.

I think millennials think they have been traumatised but compared to ww2 and the fairly routine loss of fathers/brothers/husbands, POW camps, partition in India, the war in Vietnam, IRA, famine in Africa, Gulf war, aids, Earthquakes, Tsunami, recession, and on and on, IS it a reason for uniquely stressful, sad or worried lives?

I remember that day very well. I was at primary school when it happened. And they dragged us into assembly to tell us! We all left petrified. Then at break time a plane flew over as they do as we live near an airport and a lot of kids were very scared. Myself included and were crying. I don't know what teachers where thinking telling us about it and to the point where we were petrified.

@TSSDNCOP - yes awful

Lottie I think, for me at least, it was because it felt like the first big incident of that scale in my memory caused by humans (rather than a natural disaster), & at 12 I couldn't understand it. It also led, to a degree, towards the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
I went to a school with a large Asian population (around 60% of my year were Muslim) and unfortunately some of my friends were on the receiving end of abuse due to their faith (outside school). I couldn't understand how adults could verbally attack children based on the actions of extremists.

Just because we now have live news coverage doesn't mean that previous generations weren't affected by the horrors of their own childhoods.

Imagine being born in 1900 and living through two world wars ffs. Stuff like this is why people think millennials are precious.

I agree with it seemingly being worse but I think that’s because anything post 2000 has pretty much 24/7 coverage and across a host of different media sources. I remember clearly exactly where I was when 9/11 happened, I had not long had my DS and I watched the coverage all day and into the night, it was completely shocking and emotionally draining and I was an adult.

When I was growing up there were plenty of shocking events (and I was involved in one of those) however as far as reporting and accessing anything like that it was, on the whole, shown post watershed (and for good reason) or if it was a news bulletin you were warned in advance that it might be upsetting, it would also have been highly unusual for a child of my generation to walk to the newsagents and buy themselves a copy of The Guardian or The Independent to read (I was buying Bunty or Twinkle at ages 8-10). We weren’t bombarded with coverage of every atrocity that was taking place around the globe.

I am 😮 that schools actually showed 9/11 as it was happening in front of classes of children. Completely irresponsible.

I can see how it may affect individuals but not so much an entire group of people. I only say this because anyone growing up in Northern Ireland would have been exposed to a lot and I don’t think they are all depressed etc. They had soldiers patrolling the streets with guns, would come into school buses and do checks etc. It sounds terrifying and if I (living here now) has to live through any of that I’d be terrified now even as an adult. I think for people close to the towers or surrounding areas, then the effect to them would be substantial I imagine.

What utter rubbish

Yup

As horrific as 9/11 was I don’t think seeing it aged 10 can be more life changing than all the other things people are saying they saw at age 10. All are horrific. Saying “well we had to see that at age 10 so we have worse life experiences than you” is incredibly selfish and small minded.
I’m 50 and the things that changed my mindset at that sort of age happened a lot closer to home for me. A family friend finding one of the Yorkshire Ripper victims, a mile from our house. Gang killings 3 miles from our house, regularly. Being too scared to go into the city because of the IRA bomb threats. On top of the Falklands, the IRA in NI, and all the other things people my age have mentioned.
I’m not playing top trumps, I’m saying, as many others had that each age group saw horrific things, each and every one of us could probably name something that changed their way of living their lives at that age, but we don’t all go round saying that’s why we’re fucked now.

I dunno. I don't see social media as evil in itself, I'm autistic and it's widened my social circle massively.

I'm not saying that it can't be used for evil purposes, it can.

In itself it's not just evil, though. It has its uses.

I dunno. I don't see social media as evil in itself, I'm autistic and it's widened my social circle massively.

I'm not saying that it can't be used for evil purposes, it can.

In itself it's not just evil, though. It has its uses.

The world is an overwhelmingly safe place and getting safer.

People who watch too much television and social media have an unrealistic perception of the dangers out there. I think that we all have a duty to instill in our children the fact that these terrible things happen to a very small amount of people.

Of course there is always the threat of illness and disease but this has always been present and all generations have had to live with it.

What a self-indulgent post! Sums up a ridiculous sense of entitlement and woe-is-me attitude though among some of this generation. The level of second-hand grief hijacking to justify real and imagined malaises is disgusting. Piggy-backing on to suffering and tragedy of those actually directly affected is truly tasteless. There shouldn’t be a hierarchy or tragedy Olympics yet there is an almost collective US mentality that 9/11 was this defining moment in all of our history. I really resent this myopic world view. Among the casualties were a great number of different nations granted but it seems as though the general mass of North Americans never had to deal with terror on their own soil and thus act as if this this is where it all began and they were the first ever to suffer. Yet, both overt and covert inference in the politics other countries by the USA saw so much terror elsewhere to which the average US citizen seems to be totally blind to. The US has meddled so much, caused so much military conflict and civil wars in for example South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, Jamaica etc and yet appallingly, there appears to be very little reflection into the fact this horrendous act of terrorism did not happen in a vacuum. The US and many of its citizen spent decades sponsoring terrorism elsewhere, including massive collections for the IRA that caused so much destruction and pain to British people. Adding to that the violent and deadly terrorist attacks over several decades in Europe and all across the globe, the millennial generation most certainly cannot claim some special status. It is preposterous!

Sorry about double post, app told me it didn't post.

@placemats do you mean data mining rather than mine crafting?

Only this thread lacks blocks for the latter...

Wow @IvanaPee! God, Baby Boomers are right twats!

That’s right, let’s make sweeping generalisations about 14.5 million people, because you know them all so well.

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!!

I was 15 during the first Iraq war, which my brother went to fight in.

Must have been so hard for you to watch the second one on TV.🙄

Whichever poster said self-pitying garbage is spot on.

Previous generations lived far, far more perilous lives.

That’s right, let’s make sweeping generalisations about 14.5 million people, because you know them all so well.

Given the entire premise of the thread is to generalise about millennials, why not do the same about the boomers?

Oh yeah, I forgot, we’re just not allowed to do that to boomers.

The entire thread is literally about generalizing generations 🙄.

Great post Grumpelstilskin

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.

100 percent agree with this. My dad grew up in the East End during WW2. His was an only child and his relationship with his dad (and I would argue, his life) was ruined by being evacuated. When he came back to London his house was bombed, the primary school across the road took a direct hit - all the children dead and my grandfather was one of the men who had to dig them out. No formal education because no one was able to or cared enough to deliver it. I am thankful that I can never imagine to horrors that children had to grow up in during that time.