Poll about 9/11

[Seshat]

It sounds uncaring only in the sense that you are giving a cold, detached viewpoint of what may have been part of the cause of the attack.

Thank you.

Really? You think so? Because I don't see them making decisions all that different from the past.

Sadly, the government hasn't changed all that much. But the civilians I talk with online are more aware, more alert to the possibility. It may be selection bias: I prefer talking with smart people.

[Mishi]

I was 13 when it happened and my reaction was much like Seshat's: "It was bound to happen sooner or later." I watched people jump from the towers, and I saw the towers fall on tv. I remember feeling sad for the all of the casualties and worried that the cameraman and reporter wouldn't get under cover in time.

But then, I was raised to believe that the apocalypse was going to begin soon - "Tomorrow, next week, next month, next year...the End could come at any time." I also spent a lot of time reading newspapers, old Reader's Digest and old National Geographic issues from when I was about 7 or 8, so I became pretty jaded fairly early on.

[sms001]

I think the religious apocalypses section is going to be the largest.

Ragnarök! My favorite.

[mikoyan29]

Main difference: before 9/11, Americans thought of apocalypse as fiction (except for a minority of people who believed so literally in the Bible that they were always expecting it to happen "next week" or "next year").

Now? Now we know these things can happen to us, here. It's no longer fiction. It's no longer fantasy or escapism. It's a potential reality.

I don't know, I grew up with the possibility of getting wiped out in a nuclear war. So apocolypse has always been a reality for me. This was way before 9/11. To me 9/11 was tragic and horrible but was not a harbinger of the apocolypse. Now, if the attacks were more widespread, then maybe but something tells me that if that were the case we would have figured it out.

The scenario that scares the hell out of me these days would be one of these groups getting thier hands on a nasty virus (or bacteria). And that is even within the realm of possibility. We wouldn't know what hit us until it hit us and even then it probably would look like a nasty flu outbreak.

[Seshat]

I'm expecting a bacterial, viral or fungal pandemic sooner or later. More likely sooner, IMO.

Whether it's an apocalyptic scenario or not, I dunno. Humans have recovered from 'known-world' scale pandemics before.

[Amanita]

I was in Toronto when it happened and in my early 20's. Here in Canada, I don't think we felt the effects as profoundly as in the US, but I noticed things- In Toronto, somebody tried to firebomb a Mosque, and one small bank building was tagged with "Capitalists deserve what they get".
I worked as a receptionist in a place where we routinely brought in large numbers of people for job interviews, and in the days after 9/11, I noticed a lot more people flaking and not showing up. The TTC reported that ridership was down, and many businesses reported their patronage was down too- people seemed to be afraid to go out, and were staying home.

I think this current trend of apocalypse fiction stems from many of our real world fears- we're constantly bombarded with scary stuff- climate change and environmental catastrophe, health scares of every sort, fears of economic collapse, and the like. And those fears tend to find their way into our pop culture, perhaps as a way of exploring all these frightening "what-ifs" in a safer manner.

[Greenday]

To be honest, this is the first time I've heard anyone reference 9/11 and an apocalypse in the same sentence. The apocalypse will come from conventional warfare or some naturally forming disease we are unable to control (At least as far as I figure it). Terrorists are too low tech to create an end of the world scenario.

[dendawg]

Terrorists are too low tech to create an end of the world scenario.

Once upon a time, we thought the same about a group of hijackers getting organized enough to attempt something like 9/11. Just saying.

[Cookie]

I think for a lot of the fundamentalist Christian crowd - which I was a part of at the time - it looked like a perfect setting of the stage for the rise of the antichrist. I'm not talking about a fringe group like Westboro, either, I'm talking mainstream Baptist and other denominations with similar viewpoints on this type of thing. Wars, turmoil, unrest were all expected. I was watching for a charismatic leader to come on to the scene and charm everyone. Keep in mind, the book series Left Behind was wildly popular at the time, so there were a lot of people like me reading Tim LaHaye books and watching for the "signs of the times".

[Gravekeeper]

Canadian perspective here again, did not change my view of the apocalypse at all.

Apocalyptic media has been pretty steady since the 1930's. While apocalypse/disaster movies were huge in the 70s and revived in the 90s way before 9/11. ( Thanks to Titantic ). Genre follows the money. The only thing that really changes is the topic of the apocalypse/disaster scenario. Post WWII there weren't anymore apocalypse/post apoc/disaster movies/books than there were before, but they suddenly all involved nuclear holocausts.

The reaction to 9/11 was actually the opposite, everything became sunshine and rainbows for a few years in the US. All possible references to terrorism, towers, planes, etc were scrubbed out of the media and several films where even cancelled. There was a big uptick in escapist fantasy ( LOTR, Harry Potter, etc ) as people wanted something to take their mind off it. No one dared approach the topic for several years.

For me, 9/11 was the turning point in US politics were everyone just lost their fucking mind completely. I mean, American politics was never fantastic or anything, but 9/11 was the catalyst for the total batshittery fall of the political system and the bitter polarization of people and politics. That continues to this day. 9/11 started an awful Us vs Them in the US and when they ran out of large groups of Thems they started dividing up further into smaller groups of Thems to blame. Then it completely infested the political process. Now its just a headache to watch.

[Gravekeeper]

I think for a lot of the fundamentalist Christian crowd - which I was a part of at the time - it looked like a perfect setting of the stage for the rise of the antichrist. I'm not talking about a fringe group like Westboro, either, I'm talking mainstream Baptist and other denominations with similar viewpoints on this type of thing. Wars, turmoil, unrest were all expected. I was watching for a charismatic leader to come on to the scene and charm everyone.

Which is pretty sad as 9/11, statistically speaking, is nothing in the grand scheme of things and wars, turmoil and unrest has never actually stopped in human history. -.-

Your chance of being killed by terrorists, even post 9/11, is so hilariously insignificant its not even worth mentioning. Yet the most powerful country on the planet essentially obsessed itself into a mental breakdown over the chance.

[Greenday]

Once upon a time, we thought the same about a group of hijackers getting organized enough to attempt something like 9/11. Just saying.

Who thought that would have been impossible pre-9/11? Seriously, the level of technology to takeover a plane (absolutely none) and the level of technology to create an apocalypse (very high) are insanely different.

[mikoyan29]

Once upon a time, we thought the same about a group of hijackers getting organized enough to attempt something like 9/11. Just saying.

There were people who thought of that very scenario. It was the basis of one of Clancy's books kind of.

[Gravekeeper]

Plane hijackings have been occurring since the 1930s. Commercial aviation had barely even got off the ground before people starting hijacking them. There's been hijackings even since 9/11. Hijacking also use to be the plot of every other action movie.

The failure when it came to 9/11 was ignoring the possibility of using the aircraft as a weapon. As before that standard procedure was to just do whatever the terrorists wanted until you could get safely on the ground then let the authorities deal with it. Which, if you consider the nature of the enemy ( martyr suicide bombers ), seems pretty obvious in hindsight.

The thing about 9/11 is that its a trick that could only ever be pulled off once that the government convinced the whole country could be pulled of again AT ANY MOMENT ( now let us grope you for explosives ). Since 9/11, hijacking has become a dangerous endeavour for would be hijackers as the threat of violence is no longer adequate to keep the passengers and crew from rising up as a feral mob to tear you limb from limb.

Which is pretty much what happens most the time when a hijacking has been attempted since 9/11. Even in other countries. The hijackers get mobbed.

[Cooper]

Yeah, politics be crazy.

Thing about the Antichrist is I'm fairly certain it referred to Nero. (This is coming from one class in New Testament of course.) Seeing as the new Babylon was Rome.

Mind you, facts haven't stopped anyone before. XP Especially, as I'm finding, with apocalyptic cults.

There seems to be two responses to failed end-of-the-world predictions:

A: OH! I was wrong! It's really [this date]. (I'd like to note that Jehovah's Witnesses have been doing this for almost exactly 100 years at this point.)
B: Look! You saved us all with your overwhelming faith!

A book that's pretty good on that subject is "Mistakes were made (but not by me.)"

I did learn a lot about what happened to politics from the very-aptly-titled book:
"The party is over: How the republicans went crazy, the democrats became useless, and the middle class got shafted."

The most useful part of it was explaining why the Republican primaries were so crazy. The guy had some inside view on the whole thing, because his job was a congressional analyst.

Someone literally told him he was useless because 'reality didn't matter' because they were going to make their own reality, and the author could study that.

Indeed.

That's the best example of how politics have changed in my lifetime, and my parents both having significant changes in their opinions of the political system. My mother left the republican party right around the same time they got on their anti-gay kick, and my father just abandoned the political system entirely. He doesn't vote, and he disparages the two-party system at any turn.

I'm still debating whether I want to leave the country when I finish college.

I guess I should read the "mistakes were made"book again. If I'm going into the psychology of doomsday preppers, I should go into the psychology of cults.

I have a book on Jonestown, but I'm familiar enough with Jonestown to know I'm not looking forward to reading it. (For example, in the mass-suicide he made them force-feed the children and elderly first, so anyone in-between wouldn't chicken out.)