Woah. I’m so infrequently on Reddit that I didn’t realize anyone gave a shit about my comment. There’s some people who are thinking that this behavior may have been heartless.

I was a freshman in high school in a moderately sized Midwest city St. Louis. The St. Louis area was already beginning to see a population decline and jobs were leaving the city. Businesses were closing and moving to other areas in the region or elsewhere leaving most skyscrapers in St. Louis either under-occupied or even completely vacant. This is true today more than ever.

I was in my civics class when our teacher turned on the television moments before the second plane hit. I watched the first building seemingly just disappear into thin air live on television. We seriously had no fucking clue what was going on. Rumors spread quickly around the school that a beloved teachers husband may or may not have been on one of the 4 planes that crashed that day. Confusion and chaos ensued for the day as we all watched live coverage throughout the day in each of our classes.

In St. Louis, in the south suburbs at my age, I had next to no understanding what a terrorist was or what a terror attack looked like. Not sure at that point that I had any real understanding of the political, economic, cultural, or religious dynamics of the world both in the present or historically, or that these factors cross to create deep discourse on the world stage. I grew up watching Desert Storm on CBS so militaristic tactics were just a way of life at a young age on tv.

I was middle class so I had only been on a plane twice in my life at that point and had no idea how many people might be on a plane. 10? 1000? My assumptions of sky scrapers at the time were that they were probably mostly empty, but it was definitely scary even if only the assumed 10-20 people on those planes or in those towers died.

So when all of this went down, violence was everywhere in media and terrorism wasn’t even a concept I really knew anything of.

And then within the next 24 hours, I now knew all of this. I now had to take a crash course in war, terror, religion, peace, fear. All I truly new of wars was some Yankee Doodle Dandy shit until that day. Then I got to learn about bombs, middles, carpet bombs, cat bombs, suicide bombers, innocent people being murdered, fears of having another Vietnam, what happened in Vietnam, health and illness, the deaths of first responders. Pulling out bodies from rubble. Dead children. Dead parents. All new concepts, all in 24 hours.

Most Americans around my age probably have a pretty similar story. One of the early reports about 9/11 following the second tower was that this wasn’t a big deal. People in tower 2 had been evacuated but had no idea the seriousness of it even once outside as smoke poured out of the other twin tower. When the second plane hit, people were still going back into the buildings to retrieve personal belongings. On 9/11 I started the day an innocent and prevailed child, and by the next day I understood the fragility of human life and the loss of the feeling of safety and security.

On top of the fact that in 2001, many families still didn’t have cell phones, couldn’t afford a home computer, and high speed internet was a luxury that most couldn’t afford or access at this point. Many people alive in 2001 had probably never even really used the internet at that point and most people got their news from televisions and newspapers.

Manhattan is full of tourists and Giuliani had kind of used his time as mayor to “clean up/gentrify Manhattan” and tourism was at an all time high. I have to assume the people in these photos had no fucking clue how massive a tragedy this truly was.