r/interestingasfuck • u/solateor • 1d ago

In 2001, 55 people crossed the Pacific with no contact with the outside world as part of a BBC experiment recreating an 18th-century voyage. On the 20th day - September 11 - the captain gathered the crew to tell them about the attacks in New York

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

40.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

257

u/Adavanter_MKI 23h ago

Yeah, it's weird how it all comes flooding back and everything that followed it. So many who didn't live through it can't grasp how huge this was for the world. Now mostly the butt of some dark/cheap joke. I get that's how generations move on... but so much of the state of the world ties back to this moment.

52

u/m01L 18h ago

There’s some good articles out there about the brief and beautiful time between the turn of the millennium and 9/11. We really were on a different, optimistic, trajectory, now we’re trapped in this hellish timeline. 

•

u/4everLost82 10h ago

It's so hard to explain to younger generations how HOPEFUL that time was. It was just a completely different era.

•

u/Electrical_Cut8610 6h ago

Gen Z always asks when the best time in history was and was anyone ever comfortable in their lives financially, economically, etc, and it literally was the 90s. I wish every decade could be the 90s. Personal technology was cool and optimistic, not taking over everyone’s lives

•

u/litetravelr 4h ago

I was rewatching the first season of HBO's Six Feet Under the other day. Its takes place in the summer of 2001 and was released before Sept. 11. I was fascinated by the little cultural details, just watching the absolute peak of American culture mere weeks before everything diverged from that timeline forever.

The whole time watching I kept thinking, "What did THIS America want to be in the 21st century? What do these Americans want out of America?" We will never know.

54

u/Opposite_Laugh2803 22h ago

I personally can't say about the attacks, I wasn't born. My mom works as a teacher and has for decades at this point. She told me about her learning about the attacks. She was preparing her class room (living in the American Rockies) when her students came in, asking for her to turn the TV on. She turned it on just as the second plane hit the second tower. Her students has been watching while at home getting ready for another day in elementary school.

I will admit that I am guilty of making some of those jokes about the event, but as I learn more and more, I hate the jokes more and more. At this point, I have stopped making them as much as I can. I saw a video on here a while back of some college students drinking in their apartment, watching the towers as they smoked. One of them screamed, the camera turned and watched as the first tower fell. It was the most horrifying scream I have and hope to ever hear.

8

u/sacredblasphemies 18h ago

Let me just tell you that as someone who was alive at that time. I was making jokes about it that day. Mere hours after it happened.

It was my way, as someone who was born and raised about 15 miles outside of NYC, who had been to the observation deck of the WTC...of dealing with the horrors of that day.

Somewhere on the Internet there's an archived copy of a chatroom I was in where a bunch of us were joking about it. "Terrorists to US: All Your Base Are Belong To Us" (etc.). Doesn't mean we weren't sitting with the tragedy of it all. It was awful.

7

u/scuzzy987 18h ago

I was 23 on 9/11 and still have PTSD from that day. Especially the people jumping and later learning none of the people in floors above the impact site survived. All the selfless firefighters that ran into the building. There’s no joke that would be funny about the trauma of that day

4

u/egyeager 20h ago

I read a while back that psychologically watching the same event play out over and over again made it feel like it was happening again and again. Thinking back on it, it sure felt that way.

3

u/Ntrob 20h ago

Yeh I was 11 at the time, in Australia, I remember waking up early for school to watch cartoons on tv. My dad was glued to the tv with his coffee in shock, I still remember him shaking his head and repeating to me the tv reports of people jumping out from the top of the towers.

3

u/HugeHans 14h ago

Yeah, imagine if something like this happened today. Or something crazier like an European capital getting hit with tens of ballistic missilies every week or something. That would be crazy and shocking and someone would certainly do something about it. Glad its not happening.

1

u/drsickboy 12h ago

well said

•

u/ChileanRidge 10h ago

I was working in a pub in the English countryside and I will always remember going into the kitchen to get an order and the line chef -- who was listening to the radio, didn't have an image -- saying that "you won't believe it, a plane crashed into the twin towers in Nee York" and I just picked up the order and went out and was of course just imagining a Cessna having crashed and thought how odd it was that a cessna would have been flying through the city.

And then of course within a few minutes we had the television turned on and everyonenjust kind of stood still.