a question to broken pencil
 

something weird just occured to me. you're 11, going on 12? can i ask you something?

what do you remember of 9/11?

i'm guessing he remembers a lot since he was 9 only two years ago

probably not a whole lot, since the documentary was released in 2002

he remembers the fear that gripped his soul and the hatred that burned in his heart to avenge the fallen by destroying osama. but thats about it

Nothing. I was one, and I basically don't remember anything before 4 years, so I have no idea.

My parents once told me that during 9/11 on the news, my sister was watching Teletubbies, and she refused to change the channel, so my grandma had to get her to go to her room to watch Teletubbies. I wasn't even born yet.

how can you be one and not born

THAT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE

you have to think outside the box, dave

pencil what is your understanding of 9/11. who did it, why did they do it, how did people feel, what happened in the days after, etc etc

might seem weird me asking but you gotta understand you're the youngest person i've spoken to in years. 9/11 was one of those moments for people my age they never forget first hearing about. like imagine a meteor hit a city right near you, and so many elements of the world changed after because of it, but when you asked someone about that meteor they were like "dont remember that too well???". you'd be fascinated, right? anyway, whatever i am. so tell me everything you know about 9/11 without researching it. this isn't a joke or to be mean at all i'm just, like i say, fascinated by it not being a big part of your growing up.

actually, now that we're getting other people's perspectives, cubert has piqued my curiosity

if you're a brit, why the fuck do you care?

i remember after 9/11, like the next schoolyear after, we had these like people come into the school -- i dont know whether they worked for the gov't or were independent researchers or what

but they were like having a discussion with us about patriotism, and they made us fill out some questionairre. the questions were about a made-up island called quest. the questions were like "some people on quest say that they don't care about september 11th. others are even happy that it happened. what do you say to them?" another one was like 'some of the people on quest are voting for a man called [something]. he believes in radically changing quest to get rid of democracy. how would you communicate your feelings to them about him?'

in the discussion, we were supposed to talk about our answers for the questions. so for the first question (that i just wrote) i was like "i'd say that i dont care if they know anything about september 11th or care at all, because i personally wouldnt care if their Quest island sank. like, into the ocean."

i think the researcher guys were happy with that response

but anyhow, i'm thinking now that if anything, england is lke quest. because it's an island, see. so tell me, englanders -- fellow inhabitants of a likeminded anglo-saxon commonwealth -- why would anyone on england care? is it like the way a father cares when his son scrapes a knee, or what?

Probably because it had a massive economic effect on us.

And also because it was one of the worst tradgedies in living memory. We all saw what happened to those people. Which country it happened in is pretty much irrelevant.

meanwhile, in a distant, far off part of the orient.............

The earthquake causes a tsunami with 30 ft waves that damage several nuclear reactors in the area. It is the fourth largest earthquake on record (since 1900) and the largest to hit Japan. Number of people killed (most recent): The confirmed death toll is 15,884 as of February 10, 2014.

i'm not trying to be too flippant or rude by posting that, you might completely know the tsunami up and down and have watched a lot of footage about it etc.

but man, i didnt. and i dont know anyone who did. i sure as hell cant remember where i was when i heard about it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning

haha, this is actually a great point. as huge & terrible as that catastrophe was, and as widespread the effects are, it's pretty much taboo to even talk about it, and you'll get socially shunned for bringing it up.

where did you go to school, Izak? we never had anything like that happen after 9/11, but the next day someone called in a bomb threat and everyone had to be evacuated outside, and it was hot as fuck and some people passed out cus there was no water. we had a questionnaire like that but it related to drugs, alcohol, and sex.

but thats a natural disaster, theres a part of all of us thats like .... oh well! thems the breaks

9/11 was an terrorist attack which resonates a lot more, and the death toll was the highest recorded (?maybe?)

if the point is that people here are ignorant to stuff that happens outside the western world ... well .... i guess we are *shrug*

Shunned for bringing it up? Huh? :buh That earthquake and the following nuclear disaster was in the news for months. I even donated money through my work into a relief fund (something I never did during 9/11). There was even a thread about here on 3dmm.com.

yeah, i mean....... i think things like history and language and religion and ethnicity make us feel more kinship to each other. but your point about the terrorism is also true

i also forget sometimes, as an american, that the whole world has its eye on like everything we yanks do, because if we fuck up, then everyone is basically screwed. so it makes sense in that way for people to be like "oh shit the americans are fucked, now we are as well." but it's just odd to me that this translates to a very real sort of empathy. like i was kind of flabbergasted when i just read cubert's post about everyone remembering where they were and etc, i wouldnt expect anything like that outside the US

Yeah the earthquake was covered, yeah the Fukushima plant was covered for a while, and then suddenly the news about it faded. The plant is still leaking into the ocean, poisoning and killing people in Japan and possibly overseas, destroying the oceanic environment, and the Japanese government has created a media blackout that's unheard of since WWII, and has forcefully pushed Japanese society into a weird uber-nationalized, militarized reality where they try to instigate shit with Korea and China all the time to keep people distracted from the real problem.

Was any of this covered in the news here? Not really. Bringing up the idea that the nuclear radiation may have consequences for people outside of the Japan pretty much gets you labeled as paranoid and a conspiracy theorist, even though it's basically common sense.

AFAIK, these are the only two sources to get news about Fukushima right now: http://fukushima-diary.com/ and http://www.nuclearhotseat.com/ (edit: I guess this one too http://nuclear-news.net/)

Out of those, the first one is an amateur blog run by one person, who has recently had their bank account and paypal shut down and locked without explanation when he tried to expand. The second has been hacked and taken down multiple times, in what the site described as a "professional job". So even the few news sources that are covering this, are getting attacked constantly.

If you think I'm wrong, please show me one American news source that has done a good job of covering either Fukushima or the uber-nationalism/militarization of Japan this year. I'm not talking about like, one article every few months. I'm talking about actually having a legitimate running coverage of what's going on there, not "there was another explosion but everything's gonna be fine!"


As far as it being a natural disaster, there isn't much natural about nuclear meltdown juice leaking into the ocean and poisoning the fuck out of everyone. There are allegations of misconduct at the power plant before the tsunami, allegations that costs were cut and wrong parts were used, rumors of sabotage after the fact and deliberate worker deaths and mismanagement, implications that the plant was secretly used to make weapons (from what I read, a regular nuclear power plant that's used for energy would have been incapable of having a meltdown such as this), etc... It's hard to know what's true and what's false since the whole thing is being kept under wraps.

Thought I understand that human mistakes are quite different than deliberate terrorism, I would argue that the subsequent Fukushima problems do not fall under 'natural disaster'.

Just my two cents!

BR i went to a pretty wealthy public high school in bethesda, MD. very liberal area, very well-educated, cosmopolitan sort of people......... the whole thing kind of surprised me, cos it doesnt seem like something they'd do. but we didnt have to go to class, so i was all for it. i guess it was some sort of government research thing because it was so near washington DC...? like we were never pressured into being patriotic at any other point, and some kids would even refuse to stand for the flag during the pledge of allegiance and no one cared, it was that kind of deal

Not sure why you or Izak are even comparing it to 9/11 though. 9/11 was a terrorist attack of a scale completely unprecedented for its time. As a consequence, it had lasting implications on the foreign policy of multiple world governments, triggered at least two American wars, and altered the course of history more than any other single event since WWII. It will be something that will have a deep psychological impact for an entire generation, if not more.

Cus we're talking about, How do people react to disasters in other countries, or disasters that don't directly affect them. We're not comparing the disasters, just the subsequent reaction.

Hahahahahah great thread

That's my point. 9/11 did directly affect us, and will continue to affect us. The 2011 Japan tsunami has not and likely never will. Reactions to them are certain to be different because of this, and justifiably so.

YEah, I mean, other than the fact that its constantly polluting the ocean, and the pollution will travel up the food chain, and will eventually reach us.......................

i think part of why i care is because like mccloud said, it wasn't anything natural. i was 12 bare in mind, so i'd be aware of natural disasters but, not to sound awful, they didn't really mean anything. 'monsoons' and 'earthquakes' were silly adventure ideas, like 'terrorists' was pretty much a vague term i thought i might have remembered from the boring part at the start of back to the future. big groups of people, for a kid who played crash bandicoot all day and had no interest or knowledge in world affairs, just didn't get killed in western society.

even across an ocean, 9/11 was this big sudden "HEY sometimes THIS can happen". to a 12 year old kid america is far away but it's also next door- all my tv and music and pretty much everything i liked at that age was american, i'd been to disney world a few times, and i got that we were two countries connected more closely than just by a shared language.

so yeah, an act of terrorism with people and hostages and planes, was just this very real, really perspective-fucking gamechanger. the thought of "there's an invisible, malicious force of people on this planet who would really like to kill me and people like me" just hadn't occurred to me at that age until 9/11 happened. goat used the word "unprecedented" and that's how it felt. i wasn't a retard, i knew about wars, i knew about aids, i knew about everything a 12 year old knows about but, i dunno. people in new york, drinking coca cola, doing work in offices? they just didn't get killed by things like that. it was a completely alien concept very suddenly and violently introduced to my view of the world and i'd wager most people my age feel the same. so that's why i reckon we all remember it so vividly, because it was a game changer not just for the US.