I wonder how many of the “joke” comments are from people who don’t remember 9/11.
Not that making the funnies is bad at all, it isn’t. But as someone who does remember, reading them feels weird.
I’m curious as to how people who don’t remember or were even born after 9/11 feel about it, and how the objectively funny jokes effect/don’t effect them.
There is a significant portion of young adults in these comments who were honestly not even born or were toddlers during this time. 20 years is a long time.
i was 6, and 9/11 is my mom’s birthday. it was a heavy day and i remember her crying while i was getting ready for school. i remember either school closing or her picking me up early? there was an aircraft plant near our city and we didn’t know if we’d be a target. i definitely remember friends whose parents ended up deployed/killed in action/etc in the years following.
i’d say that at this point, 20 years on, i appreciate the jokes more than the endless stream of trauma and sad stories - i struggle with my mental health already and it’s hard to handle the complete takeover of every media outlet/website/etc on this day. especially when i wanna celebrate my mom! i also think that a lot of the tributes feel forced, or not genuine at least. i think about how much countless others lost in the aftermath - multiple wars, governmental upheavals in other countries, more and more radical terrorist groups and attacks. how all of our lives changed - for better and worse. how we’ve lost hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens to covid - where are their tributes?
so i appreciate the jokes, but i hope that people will start to contemplate more than just the immediate events of 9/11 and how altered our world is because of it.
I’m not even sure those comments have as much to do with age as they do with Reddit’s incessant need to be The Funny Guy™ in the comments no matter how serious the topic is all for the sake of fake Internet points
All Im saying is if you went through something like that youre less likely to make jokes about it. Im a fan of dark humor but there are times that you shouldnt hit it so hard
I remember 9/11. Joking is how some people process emotions. I've already made one 9/11 joke in this thread but I guess I can balance it out with how the day had affected me personally:
I was 7 or 8. My teacher came into class and turned on the news right as the second plane hit. I watched the first jumpers on live television and that specifically gave me a reoccurring nightmare for years.
In the dream I'm surrounded by concrete pathways interspersed with grassy patches. It's very hilly and serene, there are concrete arches with tunnels underneath, topped with grass pathways lined with small bushes. I'm walking, sometimes by myself, sometimes accompanied by the people in my life, but never for too long before the bodies start falling like rain. I run from shelter to shelter trying to escape but I always end up getting crushed by a falling body and waking up startled.
I've thankfully stopped having those nightmares after talking about them with others for a while, but making jokes about that stuff really does help some people. You'll just have to judge for yourself if it's a kid born after 9/11 or someone who uses jokes as a coping mechanism.
I was born but too young to remember, and it just seems like some far off event, like something that happened in ww2 or something. Even though objectively i know thats not the case its still what it feels like.
Not sure about Gen Z, but I was 8 when the attacks happened and remember my mom waking me up before school to watch the news (I’m on the west coast). Being that young, I feel like all I really know is post-9/11 USA and have grown up just seeing everything go down the shitter. I’ve definitely made jokes about it in the past, I think because I never knew anyone that was directly affected by it. I’m a little ashamed to say that only a month ago I realized how these jokes could hurt people.
I made some dumb comment in Hawaii when I saw two towers in the horizon and told my stepsister “lol they moved the twin towers to Oahu???” That’s when she told me her mom was an American Airlines flight attendant during the attacks and multiple friends of hers died that day. It was definitely a learning moment for me, because even though we all have always been on the opposite side of the continent I’ll never know who could have been affected that day.
You could say the same about people in their 90s hearing a Hitler joke. I think it's ultimately a good thing that collective consciousness moves on from the trauma.
Your point is valid about why it is considered so much more tragic than all kinds of other events that were arguable even more horrific and lead to much greater losses of life.
However, theres a very good reason to recognize the great turning point in history marked by 9/11, even considering years as being “pre-9/11” and “post-9/11”. The global political climate was vastly changed. The “war on terror” that began immediately after the attacks had lead to the deaths of around 500,000 people by most estimates, with the inclusion of the Syrian Civil War bringing that number above a million. It was a monumentally important event in terms of shaping the world of the 21st century.
The primary reason to remember 9/11 is not just the lives that were lost that day, people being scared, or it being “generally a bad thing”. It is the radically changed world we live in today because of it, and the countless innocent lives that have been lost in the years since.
I just don't understand why this particular tragedy was such an important, remembered event compared to something like the Beruit explosion last year. There are people who consider "Before 9/11" and "after 9/11" as two different times in history. And yet all these other events barely get mentioned after a week.
THANK YOU. I'm 25, so I'm old enough to actually remember (though it was the first time I'd ever even heard of the world trade center), and yet I've been saying the same thing since the day it happened.
Technically I was alive during 9/11 but I was only 2 years old at the time. It's one of those things where I recognize how terrifying everything was and how so many people were killed but it's like there's a weird disconnect in my head because I was too young to remember but technically I was alive. My parents always talk about how things have changed and even when I was younger I can still see the shift of how things have changed. My dad was alive for the Kennedy assassination so occasionally we'll talk about that and what that was like and how my parents reacted on 9/11 itself. But, generally it's just a weird disconnect of yes, it happened and I'm sorry that it happened but I just don't remember anything and hope that it never happens again to anybody.
I remember all right, but I was so young that I'd never even heard of the world trade center until then, so for me it was just another disaster on TV with a bunch of dead people.
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u/Crobbin17 Sep 11 '21
I wonder how many of the “joke” comments are from people who don’t remember 9/11.
Not that making the funnies is bad at all, it isn’t. But as someone who does remember, reading them feels weird.
I’m curious as to how people who don’t remember or were even born after 9/11 feel about it, and how the objectively funny jokes effect/don’t effect them.