I was in 7th-grade music class when the terrorists flew planes into the towers and so on 25 years ago. This confused people. “I was in music when I heard,” I said, and possibly wrote in a poem they made us write in English class. People thought I meant that, like, the news of thousands of people dying was music to my ears. Like I had happy musical notes swirling around my head.
They sent us home from school that day and I watched the news and the replays of the impacts and collapses were endless. I think they sent a letter too, but that was for adults so I didn’t care about that. Rumors spread quickly— middle-school idiots. “Next they’re going to hit us with a half-atomic, half-nuclear bomb.” I suppose that’s technically not incoherent. My English teacher, a lesbian among kids who didn’t know what lesbians were, said that she was very disappointed when she overheard kids in the hallway yelling, “Kill the towelheads!” although to be completely honest, although I don’t support that sentiment… I kind of see why stupid kids would have been saying that that week. Although my high school was very diverse, my middle school was less so; I am not aware of any brown students being harassed or, like, blamed, but it must have happened. Oh, and back then, the news wasn’t on literally all the fucking time.
The newspaper articles about 9/11 were really cool and thorough. Maybe too cool. Possibly they relished showing these detailed diagrams of how exactly the towers collapsed.
I should have been contacted by the government, for I knew right away that the culprit was Osama bin Laden. In 6th grade I had found a magazine (in school! Maybe we were making collages?) with an article about him and the 1993 WTC bombing. So when I heard that terrorists had hijacked planes etc. I thought, “I bet it was that Osama bin Laden guy.” And I was right.
In the coming years young people made a lot of Flash games and animations about fighting terror, including one where at the end you literally just button-mashed to pummel the shit out of Osama, and one where President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (spelled it right the first try) teamed up and pulled out some heat to defend the White House from a siege of terrorists.
One of my favorite books as a kid was Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy, which was about tactical counterterrorist shootouts and inspired an extremely popular video game franchise. I thought Clancy books were more action-packed than they really are based on this one. What’s interesting about it is that it came out before September 11, 2001 and is all about terrorism, so it’s an interesting glimpse into a world of terrorism completely untouched by 9/11. Early on the main character laments that his fucking gun is in his carry-on in the overhead bin instead of on his person, which is crazy to read nowadays.
By the way, a lot of kids ask why the passengers didn’t just kick the shit out of the terrorists. The reason was that because up until this point in the history of terrorism, airplane hijackings generally just involved governments negotiating with terrorists and getting them to land somewhere and let the passengers off. Nobody thought that these pricks were actually going to use the planes themselves as suicide bombs against buildings.
I remember being confused when we ended up going to war with Iraq. Life got rather complicated after this.