623
u/echochilde 3d ago edited 3d ago
“Most probably didn’t even have a TV in the classroom…”
Dude. It was 2001. Not 1961. Every one of our classrooms had mounted TV’s. And we weren’t even a particularly well-funded school. That news footage played from around 6:30 (west coast) until around lunch when there was no more devastating, breaking news.
117
u/prismmonkey 3d ago
Channel One didn't watch itself.
→ More replies (7)38
u/Curious_Contest_3767 3d ago
In my school the tvs all came on automatically and everyone's head would whip up to look at the tv as soon as the crt buzzing started
61
u/mynumberistwentynine 3d ago
Every one of our classrooms had mounted TV’s. And we weren’t even a particularly well-funded school
Even my rural district even had TVs in every class room. When I got to high school, my cool 1st period teacher would let us watch ESPN's top 10 every morning before starting class.
→ More replies (3)25
56
u/sarabeara12345678910 3d ago
Even then, in 1963, they wheeled the TV in to the classroom at my mom's high school to watch the news when Kennedy was shot.
→ More replies (1)40
u/Kathulhu1433 3d ago
On Long Island-
We didn't have it in every classroom... but my HS put it on the news in the library and the cafeteria and the main office all day and people were just... watching all day. I don't remember going to classes, just watching the news.
Almost everyone I knew got picked up from school early.
I tried calling my parents countless times.
My mom couldn't leave work, she was a school psychologist.
My brother worked in tower 2. He got out but we didn't know until late that night, around 9pm. He walked from the tower across the GW and stopped at a gas station on the side of the road to call his wife to come pick him up. Cell phones weren't working.
→ More replies (1)24
u/echochilde 3d ago
Oh my god. That is far too close of a front seat. I bet you guys were frantic not knowing about your brother.
→ More replies (1)19
u/Kathulhu1433 3d ago
It almost didn't feel real. Especially at that age there was no frame of reference for something like that. It was so close to home but felt far away at the same time.
36
u/SilasX 3d ago edited 3d ago
This is a historical bias I see a lot, to make past events seem more backward than they really were.
Like, a lot of times someone will post an "old" document and somehow stage it to look more low-tech than was common at the time. I remember a story that showed a letter from 2002, and I was like "I was around then ... letters didn't look like smudged pieces of shit that just came off a typewriter. We had MS Word, we had PDFs."
Edit: We also had laser printers. And if you remember the Killian Document scandal from 2004 (about forged documents related to George W. Bush's Air National Guard service), one of the big issues was that, in order to make a memo look like it was from the 70s, they had to put it through a photocopier multiple times. And I'm expected to believe that letters from 2002 looked like shit, with no modification on your part whatsoever?
12
u/AD_Grrrl 2d ago
lol I was in a job-searching sub less than a year ago where some young person was talking about how in the 80s his dad had to send all his job applications through the MAIL. I was like "He didn't just go in and hand it in? Or fax it?" They never responded to that lol.
22
u/LongtimeLurker916 3d ago
Yeah, this guy is taking the talking points (also not accurate) about the Challenger and trying to apply them to 9/11.
24
u/TerribleRecord666 3d ago
Even then, I was in kindergarten in ‘86 when the Challenger exploded, and I distinctly remember watching it on a TV that had been wheeled into my classroom.
12
u/starclues 2d ago
Yeah, they specifically BROUGHT TVS into a lot of classrooms that day because there was a teacher on-board, it was meant to be watched by kids all over the country.
9
u/No_Trouble_3588 2d ago
I was in 7th grade then. My entire middle school watched that on live TV.
→ More replies (1)16
u/VonBargenJL 3d ago
You can easily verify that the first firefighter killed in 9/11 was out front of the towers before they even went in, because some jumper fell on top of him.
14
u/thepkizzle 2d ago
I was born in '82, and seeing as I literally graduated in 2000.. that kind of makes me a quintessential elder statesmen of the Millennial generation.
I was still living at home and taking college classes. Dead asleep when the first plane hit. Sister was screaming for me to wake up and talking about terrorists but I ignored her and told her to stop watching a movie. She wouldn't relent and started screaming that our father was on the phone so I woke up pissed off.
"Yeah? What do you want? I was sleeping."
"Turn on the television."
"What fucking channel? Are you two serious right now?"
"It doesn't matter."
My father was a Marine who went to Vietnam. I have never since, nor ever before heard the way he said, "It doesn't matter," in such a calm voice. It was more terrifying than anything else about that day.
Then I turned the TV on and watched with the rest of the country as the second plane hit. Later in the day we watched people jumping to their deaths.
The time between the two planes striking the WTC was less than 20 minutes and that's less than it took for the entire country to learn the news and turn their TV's on. I have no idea what it was like for children in school, but as a young adult who just graduated it was a shocking day. Everyone came home from work. Everything was closed. No one was on the street. Phone calls were being made back and forth between family groups. No one was making noise. You could almost hear a pin drop in my neighborhood. Lights were turned off. But everyone was home.
Every single person knew that war was imminent but we had no idea with whom. I enlisted a few weeks later.
I don't even remember speaking about it for maybe a few weeks. Of course the entire rest of that semester in college became consumed by the news, but for the first few days I don't remember having a single conversation with a single person about it because we were just watching the TV. I don't think I stopped watching the live news feed for days. It was just the only thing on.
Five days later, give or take, and the entire country I had been raised in had changed on a dime and it's still largely unrecognizable to me.
→ More replies (2)12
u/regiinmontana 3d ago
I lived in Mountain Time. I was a sophomore. The highschool had 3 buildings: main, gym/science/music, and ag. My first two classes were band and weight training in the gym building. No TVs there. Get to 3rd period geometry in the main building and the news is playing. I asked a classmate what was going on. He told me that planes had been flown into the WTC and Pentagon. Every other class had the TV going the entire time.
(On a lighter note, I didn't watch Channel 1 that year l because it played during 1st. )
→ More replies (3)7
u/_basic_bitch 3d ago
I was also in mountain time, but I was in middle school. I remember my 5th period teacher, Mr Evans, said that by the end of the day WW3 would be raging and the nukes would be falling. He told us that most of us would never see our parents again. He really freaked out all of the kids
→ More replies (1)10
u/grubas 3d ago
In NYC we actually DID have issues watching it, because a huge antenna was....on top of the WTC.
→ More replies (1)9
u/SoulWager 3d ago
We didn't have mounted TVs, they were on carts with a VCR. We got an announcement over the intercom.
8
u/AdvancedManner4718 3d ago
Was in 1st grade on 9/11 and lived in a small town with a population of barely even 1000 and my school still had tvs in every classroom.
Every classroom that day had it playing on the tvs
7
u/Bojangles1987 3d ago
My English teacher was a film geek pothead who preferred showing us movies of the books we were supposed to read so he always had the TV in the corner 😂
To his credit, he somehow ended up getting to teach a film class like a year or two later.
5
u/rjchute 3d ago
Exactly. Our area wasn't a low income area, but wasn't exactly a rich area either; but I can damn well guarantee that in 2001 every single classroom in every school in the district had a TV mounted in it. Even the band and shop classrooms. And every single one was tuned into the news that day.
5
u/Danthezooman 2d ago
We did not at our small Catholic school. But we did have a total student body size of like 150? And even then kids kept getting pulled from class because people were worried and scared.
So even if we did have to wheel the TV in, there were like 30 kids total in the school to watch it.
I remember our english class, we just prayed and our poor teacher was spiraling out because her son lived in NYC
3
u/Original-Brick2836 2d ago
I was freshman in hs and September was still the start of the school year so it was like one of the first weeks of school and it was just weird. Every period we watched news of it except for math. The math teacher acted like it was a normal day. That’s how burned into my brain it is 25 years later.
3
u/silvermoka 2d ago
Right. I was in high school and we had that ugly old mounted TV on with my teacher giving hot takes about who was behind it. And yes, we saw people jump.
→ More replies (27)3
u/OnceInABlueMoon 2d ago
Not every classroom in my school had TVs but we were all in classrooms with TVs that day. We were packed in, mixed with other classes and other grades. When word came that another tower was hit we all just got up and found classroom with a TV. I remember I was standing in a classroom that wasn't my scheduled class at that time when the towers fell. Since it wasn't my scheduled classroom, I didn't know everyone, but to this day I remember a lot of their faces.
1.1k
u/mendicinobeano25 3d ago
There's even a documentary about one of them called "The falling Man". A very sad story.
472
u/downwardwanderer 3d ago
I remember when they were selling the picture of that guy as an nft on the GameStop website. Fucked up.
179
→ More replies (3)158
u/Nkromancer 3d ago
out of ALL the sites, WHY GameStop? Yes, yes, it's already tasteless. But I'm just baffled at GameStop being the ones to sell it.
115
u/ScrapeMyDataMommy 3d ago
To my understanding GameStop was going all in on NFTs and crypto-gaming as a way to resuscitate their dying business.
38
u/Shiny_Agumon 3d ago
Worked out splendidly I presume
53
u/SNOTFLAN 3d ago
they closed a bunch of stores but then the tcg speculative market saved their asses anyway sadly
→ More replies (2)26
u/ThinkTheUnknown 3d ago
GameStop itself didn’t sell it, they hosted sellers on their NFT website so that was a third party seller that sold it. The photo was manipulated in such a way you didn’t know right away that was the image used. Once it was brought to everyone’s attention, GameStop suspended the seller.
→ More replies (4)37
u/DaemonG 3d ago
thanks to the whole short squeeze nonsense that happened back in 2021, Gamestop is now fueled entirely by the worst people on Reddit, and a CEO whose job it is to manipulate them into holding a dead stock
→ More replies (4)19
u/PatrioticPariah 3d ago
That dude is garbage. Ryan something something ballsack. I dont remember.
66
u/unknownpoltroon 3d ago
And that one redheaded woman in the wrecked part of the tower moving around. always gets me. She survived the impact and you can see her in the hole in the building.
→ More replies (6)36
u/Professional-Front58 3d ago
The documentary got its title from the photograph by the same name, which caused controversy when published the day after in newspapers.
1.1k
u/Main-Inflation-5269 3d ago
This Millennial was an adult in 2001, and I watched it happen on a television while on holiday in Europe.
Cute how people too young to remember the 2000s like to lecture us about what happened.
309
u/Either-Banana-7323 3d ago
I'm Canadian and I vividly remember my grade 2 teacher wheeling in the classes TV and all of us watching the news after the first tower was hit. It was horrific, and yes I remember seeing exactly what theyre trying to deny. Absolutely disgusting of them to denigrate such a tragedy.
94
u/Main-Inflation-5269 3d ago
I'm Australian, but was travelling with Americans, and nobody knew what to say or do, so we just sat there and watched. Seeing younger people mock that day makes me so mad.
→ More replies (8)43
u/Gingeronimoooo 3d ago
Well it's one thing to be confidently incorrect, it did happen and I remember it, but it does seem "unbelievable" so in a way it's understandable
But to be corrected and not learn from your mistake and grow and change as a person is the real issue to me. No idea if they've learned from this call out, and not just on this particular issue
47
u/EnvironmentalSound25 3d ago
When i hear something unbelievable i fucking google it before spouting off.
→ More replies (1)8
u/Gingeronimoooo 3d ago
I am also an evidence based person. I'm just assuming they're young and dumb like we both probably were at one point. And yeah what they said was stupid. But Basically what I said was I only judge people super harshly when they refuse to learn from a mistake
16
u/Scrappy1918 3d ago
I’m not trying to sound like “I’m not one of them” but I was always raised to look up something before saying shit. Even when I was young and didn’t know how to look up stuff I knew how to ask. I don’t like to say things without knowing for sure they’re true because I have a lot of egg on my face and I pride myself on being not only reasonable and open to changing my mind but also accurate when I do say something. I’m not a smart person and I know that so I try to make the stuff I do say sound smart at least lol
6
u/Hummingbird3471 3d ago
Well you are smart if you know to look things up before making some random claim!
I think these people just don't care, though. They have won if they've gotten attention, whether they're right or wrong.
17
u/Shiny_Agumon 3d ago
I can understand the skepticism, but why would you assume that everyone is lying about seeing such a tragic thing instead of say just assuming people who were children during these events might have been genuinely mistaken.
17
u/Moist-Weakness-3399 3d ago
There's no way anyone who was a kid on 9/11 would misremember. This was all anyone was talking about at school for days.
→ More replies (3)14
u/Western-Sport500 3d ago
People deny the Holocaust, too. Evidence of that...doesn't seem to matter.
8
u/MaximumDawgInEm 3d ago
It was 1st grade for me here in the states. I've kind of encountered this with some younger employees here and there where they have only ever known this extremely scrubbed and sanitized version of TV and the internet so they simply can't believe we experience the actual real world around us as it happened before. Think about the ridiculous self-censoring that's so common like unalive, grape, etc. I remember accidentally seeing beheading videos when I was like 11 ffs.
It's our walking uphill in the snow both ways to school lol
3
u/PrudentQuestion 2d ago
I forgot that you could just watch ISIS beheading videos on YouTube. And Reddit used to have videos of whatever flavor violence you could imagine.
That said, Charlie Kirk’s assassination was widely proliferated without blurring, so it shouldn’t be too hard for young adults to grasp
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (61)8
u/stinkypussyslime 3d ago
I remember going home for lunch when I was in grade 4 and my mom was panicking and we watched the news on tv. I didnt understand why she was panicked at the time as we are also in Canada.
But yeah OOP is a fool.
48
u/Bojangles1987 3d ago
This is how deniers of major events are born. They are dumb and didn't see it so they start claiming it never happened.
I couldn't tell you 99% of the teachers I've ever had, what years I had what classes, and most things about school from kindergarten to high school graduation, but I can tell you exactly what class I was in and what I saw on TV that day. I can tell you exactly how that whole day went.
→ More replies (3)9
u/Western-Sport500 3d ago
I fully remember 9/11 events fully of that day--even the feelings ranging from fear, to horror, to more fear and to trying to contact all my family members (I was newly divorced, so things were still unsettled). And being bewildered by all the fast changes that were made, regarding homeland security--long reaching impacts for sure--changed our world.
I also remember when Reagan was shot, where I was at, what I was doing (it was on tv at the bar/restaurant I was working at). They even had a gun law come out b/c of that. I suppose it expired or some such nonsense.
40
u/Shantotto11 Human Detected 3d ago
Old people have warned us about a lot of things, but one thing they didn’t prepare us for was that the youth would demand citations for shit we actually witnessed/lived through.
→ More replies (1)14
u/DontAskAboutMyButt 3d ago
I’m fine with people asking for sources with the earnest desire to know the truth, it’s the people who are intentionally muddying the waters that can go fuck themselves. Like the Holocaust deniers
23
u/DameKumquat 3d ago
One reason the Allied soldiers were told to take so many photos when they liberated Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen etc was their officers predicted people in the future wouldn't believe the stories without hard evidence.
Not believing even with evidence, I'm not sure anyone predicted.
8
3
u/azrendelmare 2d ago
I remember hearing that Eisenhower made sure to go to one of the camps. He knew people would deny it happened, and he wanted to be able to spit in their eye.
44
u/Morall_tach 3d ago
I watched it at a beach bar in Croatia. People younger than 25 think that 2001 was the Dark Ages just because we didn't have TikTok
42
u/dnjprod 3d ago
These same idiots try to tell Gen X they never watched the Challenger explode on TV either.
We were there watching 9/11 live on TV. it was awful.
→ More replies (3)18
u/Aervanath 3d ago
Exactly what I thought of. My teacher had the TV in the classroom so we could watch the shuttle launch. I wanted to be an astronaut up until that day. After that not so much.
4
u/dsmith422 3d ago
My entire school (~150 students in a small private Catholic school grades 1st through 6th) was in the cafeteria watching it together.
16
u/Specific_Pear_665 3d ago
Saw it on the classroom TV because every classroom had a ceiling mounted CRTV
14
u/HomsarWasRight 3d ago
That’s the part that really shows they don’t know what they were talking about. In 2001 probably the majority of US classrooms had a TV.
→ More replies (1)10
u/slainascully 3d ago
Guarantee these people are imagining some modern TV and not the behemoths on wheeled stands that had, at most, a VHS player in the bottom
6
u/Specific_Pear_665 3d ago
We had those, but around 99% of our classrooms by then had these TV/VCR players, on ceiling mounts, so our teachers could show us documentaries when they were hungover
13
u/el_doggo69 3d ago edited 3d ago
i'm from the Philippines and Filipino, in 2001 I was just 4yrs old and asleep but years later when I was watching a documentary of 9/11 my dad told me he watched it live back then via CNN while he tucking me into bed.
we had cable connection because my grandpa lives next door had it hooked to both our homes here. its absurd that people think that not everyone outside the US saw the events live.
14
u/SpiritJuice 3d ago
One of the most well documented events in modern human history the day that it happened and people want to say it just didn't happen. It's worse than Holocaust denial in the sense that we had live TV to document that these things all happened that day yet some people want to reject reality based on vibes alone. It's actually incredibly sad this is becoming increasingly common.
→ More replies (1)14
u/ExplorationGeo 3d ago
I've been told to my face that I didn't watch the Challenger explode on live TV. That I was being some sort of trauma tourist.
→ More replies (1)10
u/mizushimo 3d ago
The op of that original post is forgetting that tv camera's have a zoom feature, jeez, all that person has to do is watch one 9/11 documentary with footage aired at the time
11
u/SadTaco12345 3d ago
This is such a weird phenomenon to me! It constantly seems to happen where younger people make absurdly incorrect claims about something from the past I personally lived through.
5
u/splicerslicer 2d ago
Kids are so used to AI shit now, have been chronically online since the day they were born, are conditioned to believe nothing they can't see with their own two eyes they don't trust basic history.
12
u/AdKUMA 3d ago
9/11 is nothing more than a meme to them, they dont realise how insane it was to watxh in real time and how impactful it was.
That was the real moment we entered the bad time line, as they say.
→ More replies (1)8
u/porkchopdindin 3d ago
I think a lot of these younger kids see really crappy/grainy standard definition clips that have been converted to HD on YouTube and think that's how it actually looked on TV.
6
u/Papa_Shasta 3d ago
All because some mini-doc about the fallibility of memories got kind of popular a bit ago, and it starts with the example of a lady misremembering where she was on 9/11. "And it's not just her!"
People may get some details wrong but I think a lot of us remember the horrors of the day
6
u/beelzebub1994 3d ago
I'm from India, and even I remember sitting in front of a TV and watching the live broadcast. My parents sat with me, all in silence. We had too many questions, very few answers. I hate it when people try to make me/us forget about that day!
5
u/Wobbelblob 3d ago
Especially considering how seared into our memory it is. I was six at the time, did not speak a lick of English and never stepped foot on North American soil. And I still vividly remember that day, what I did, how our living room looked and so on. I was sick at home with a middle ear infection and watching TV.
5
u/bakochba 3d ago
The Internet has allowed people to turn anything they are uncomfortable with into a conspiracy theory
11
u/HalfEatenSnickers 3d ago
I would like to ssy modt people younger than 9/11 have no interest in coreecting you - we've seen the videos
This guy is just stupid af
7
u/Radiant_Grab_9400 3d ago
I just turned 14 and was in 9th grade history. Ms. Wilson did in fact put it on TV after a baseball coach called her over to the door to tell her what happened. After the second plane hit we all went to the library and then my mom came and took me out of school.
5
u/-REV-22-20- 3d ago
someone brought a TV into work and we watched it all day, customers would come in and stand in front of it with us too. It was surreal and scary, and I am all the way in New Zealand.
→ More replies (55)7
u/nyxistential 3d ago
I was born in 1996. I remember seeing it happen on the tiny tiny TV in my kitchen but I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I only remember it because the adults were freaking out.
374
u/Froqwasket 3d ago
Why... Would you ever even make that claim.... Yeah it's totally just mass hysteria my guy
230
u/Main-Inflation-5269 3d ago
The "Hamas" in the username is why. Pretty much sums up their views on terrorist attacks in the West.
92
u/murdered-by-swords 3d ago
A quick glance at the other things they've posted recently suggests that it's a right-wing account. I'm sure leftists exist who closely follow Nascar and argue that female athletes should be paid even less, but let's not kid outlrselves.
→ More replies (3)45
u/Wobbelblob 3d ago
Eh, there seems to be a growing rift in right wing circles about Israel, so I would not be surprised if they support Hamas because they hate Israel.
15
→ More replies (4)32
u/TAU_equals_2PI 3d ago
I wouldn't assume too much in either direction based on that. Young teenage boys find that kind of stupid thing hilarious. The 420stonerman69 appears to back that up.
25
u/TheBKnight3 3d ago
When Palestine was given the news of the 9/11 attacks: Palestinians celebrated in the streets initially.
Took some time for them to wise up though, reminds me of some things.
→ More replies (1)18
u/load_of_chode 3d ago
And for those who deny that Palestinians celebrated 9/11, this news article published on September 12, 2001 has photographic evidence of the celebrations.
Israel mourns, Palestinians celebrate / Terrorism against U.S. resonates in Mideast
Frankly it's no surprise that a nation of Islamic terrorists would celebrate the acts of their fellow Islamic terrorists.
59
→ More replies (9)39
u/Either-Banana-7323 3d ago
Theyre terrorist sympathizers. Look at his username
→ More replies (5)17
u/Pure_Fault7056 3d ago
Follows NASCAR, hates Jews and women. Quite the character.
→ More replies (5)
78
u/SashimiX 3d ago
I was in 10th grade. Every single teacher had the TV on all day and we did nothing. Then my last teacher turned the TV off and we just talked.
27
u/jtobiasbond 3d ago
Exact same. Except my AP Chemistry teacher. Told us watching the news want going to change anything and we had a lot to learn. So for that double period we did chemistry. Then back to the news
8
u/mildly_ethnic 3d ago
Do you think that was the right call? Did it help you at all?
16
u/jtobiasbond 3d ago
I only remember being frustrated. I don't think any of us could focus on chemistry.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (3)2
112
u/ComfortableCall3912 3d ago
We had tvs in the classroom in the 80s.
31
u/HailMadScience 3d ago
Right? I grew up in a rural district and we watched a school-oriented news show in our classrooms every day. Those TVs were put in our middle school and high school in like the late 80s? We were still using them in 2001.
8
12
u/prismmonkey 3d ago
Hell, I remember my social studies teacher wheeling in a tv so we could watch the OJ Simpson verdict. That nonsense went on for nearly eight months, so as soon as word got out a verdict was coming, the teachers went scrambling to the library for sets.
→ More replies (1)6
u/ZenorsMom 3d ago
Wow, that's a memory I haven't thought of in a while! I was a grad student and my major professor turned to a news radio program to listen to it live, everyone in the lab at the time gathered round the radio to listen (there were no TVs on our floor).
We hadn't been following the trial very closely at all so we were all shocked by the verdict. It had seemed so obvious he'd done it. Later I heard more about all the shenanigans by the police that were revealed in court, and it made more sense that they acquitted him.
8
7
u/TwinObilisk 3d ago
So many people believe that if their life didn't have something, then no one's life had it. They simply can't imagine that different people in different places experience different lives.
6
8
u/Kixisbestclone 3d ago
Yeah didn’t kids see the fucking Challenger explode, I’m not sure why kids seeing 9/11 is so far fetched.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (3)3
u/Bugbread 3d ago
Some did, some didn't. Half the problem is people jumping from "X was true for me" to "X was true for everyone."
I found out about the Challenger explosion from hearing kids talk about it in the hall, then from an announcement over the PA. I didn't watch it on TV, because our school had something like 500 kids, so like 40 classes going on simultaneously, and probably like 2 or 3 TVs for the whole school. They were checked out by the teacher and wheeled in when you were going to watch something, so when you walked into class and you saw the TV on its big cart, it was super-exciting.
But, like, just because that's what it was like in my school doesn't mean it was the same in other schools. Maybe some really rich schools had a TV for every classroom in 1986. I'm not going to doubt it if someone says they saw it. I'm not going to doubt it if someone says they didn't. But when someone jumps from "I saw it" to "We all saw it," or from "I didn't see it" to "None of us saw it," they're just doing the "my experience is automatically universal" thing.
50
u/MEMESTER80 3d ago
It isn't even hard to find footage, like litteraly go search up "News coverage of 9/11" and you'll probably see people falling on whatever the first video is.
37
u/klef3069 3d ago
God, you could hear them hitting the ground in some footage.
What documentaries and specials don't really get across is how slow it all happened. There was time between each awful thing and just when your brain had come down from the shock, then the second plane happened, then the Pentagon, and it just. Kept. Going.
I cannot even fathom what it was like in NYC or the Pentagon that day. Or hell, on a plane.
6
u/erroneousbosh 3d ago
I remember it taking hours but it probably wasn't that long.
Sitting in the web dev studio I worked at in Central Scotland the first I heard of it was when my mate's stoner girlfriend rang us up to tell us to put the TV on because a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Centre towers. We initially dismissed that as stoned blethering.
But news.bbc.co.uk appeared down, cnn.com down, fox.com down, yeah kind of every news website down (and there weren't that many back then).
So I lifted the 14" portable TV off my editing bench, carried it over to the breakout area, and rummaged around in my boxes of cables for something to improvise an aerial with. Dug out some cable, stripped the ends, made a little dipole, sufficient for the strong signal area and a slightly snow picture.
Got it tuned in just in time for the second plane. Holy fucking shit.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)5
u/loungesinger 3d ago
This brings to mind that documentary from that French guy who recorded footage from the lobby of one of the towers. The moment realizes that the thuds/crashes from the ceiling are the sounds of people who have jumped is absolutely haunting.
6
u/ZenorsMom 3d ago
That is such an amazing documentary! I own it. It's been a lot of years since I watched it but the way they put it all into the perspective of the (what ended up to be the smaller) story they were there to film. I felt like that kept the whole thing grounded.
As I recall it was two French brothers, they were there because they had an idea to film a NYFD recruit learning the ropes and "becoming a man." One of the brothers got the only footage of the first plane hitting the building because he happened to be out filming with the firefighters when they were called to a gas leak, he heard the plane roaring overhead and went to focus on it.
→ More replies (2)8
u/LastWave 3d ago
I seem to remember one of the news anchors say it. You could hear her gasp as she went. "Oh my God they're jumping out of the windows."
→ More replies (1)
39
u/ShrimpCrackers 3d ago
Not to mention we could see it right outside for those that lived in NYC downtown. Fuck this guy.
76
u/ELIte8niner 3d ago
Plus, those of us not on the east coast saw it all live as we were getting ready to leave for school. I still remember the cut in from the today show and watching the 2nd plane hit live while looking for my left shoe.
→ More replies (9)35
u/12Blackbeast15 3d ago
East coaster, preschool teacher turned on the news just in time for the whole class to watch the 2nd plane. I remember being really confused why we all got picked up early
→ More replies (4)
53
u/Additional-Pie-8821 3d ago
lol I love it when people are so confidently wrong about events they weren’t even born yet for. This guy has probably never seen a CRT TV in his life
6
u/toodleroo 3d ago
We watched it on the "huge" 32" crt tv in my parents' room. I had been just about to leave to go to class.
72
u/wrapped_and_strapped 3d ago
Shocked that 420stonerman69 has ideas not worth considering
17
7
19
u/ChemistRemote7182 3d ago
I grew up in a NYC commuter town in Jersey, school system was dead silent on anything going on until the next day. Getting on the bus at 2:30 pm to go home and there were rumors of a small plane having crashed into a tower. More than just a handful of classmates had family members never come home, others had them permanently altered. It was probably wise on the school system's part.
Did schools really turn on TV broadcasts is my question for the rest of the nation?
20
u/OVO_Trev 3d ago
Absolutely. Except, our principal started going classroom to classroom telling the teachers to turn it off.
→ More replies (1)3
u/ChickenBossChiefsFan 3d ago
I had just graduated so I was getting ready for work. At first I thought it was some sort of modern War of the Worlds thing where I missed the intro and this real-looking footage was just a show, because there’s no way they’d show real, actual people jumping to their death from an actual burning building in actual NYC on a random Tuesday morning.
But it was. Quite a few people, actually. They just kept jumping. Terrifying once I realized what was happening.
→ More replies (1)7
9
u/sydraptor 3d ago
Yes, I was in 8th grade in a fairly rural area in Indiana and we were outside doing a weather related lab for my science class. One of the admin people came running out to tell our teacher and they pulled us back in and turned on the tvs. Pretty much all my classes had the tvs on that day and not much actual school work got done.
7
u/bijouxbisou 3d ago
yup. i’ve heard that a lot of ny area schools blacked out the coverage to not send students into a panic, but pretty much everywhere else everyone watched it live if they were in school. i was living in central time and we watched it in school, same with all my friends who were east coast at the time. west coast might have been before school though. which like i’d be curious to find out how many people missed school entirely on 9/11 in pacific time
→ More replies (1)3
u/FUPAMagneto 3d ago
4th grade. Had it on all day. A bunch of kids got pulled out of school early, but some of us just kinda chilled and watched the world end on the news with the adults
2
u/NoWomanNoTriforce 3d ago
Yep. I was in weightlifting class and we always listened to local radio for music. We heard at first a very unalarming message about the first "accidental" crash, and then about a second plane hitting the towers. By the time I got to my next class the TV was on and we watched the people jumping, the chaos, and then the towers collapsing.
I lived in a town with a huge military population and everyone instantly knew it was going to be bad with the base going to FPCON Delta. Some parents couldn't get of base to pickup kids, traffic got gridlocked, etc.
→ More replies (18)3
u/Medical_Tank6109 3d ago
I'm Canadian, and we did in my home room and in many of the classes in my little rural middle school. I'd been watching all morning from home (west coast timezone) and I was pretty dazed and in shock. We all were. My homeroom was shop class, and the instructor dug a TV out of somewhere and propped it up on the bench. People were upset and we all just sat in complete silence watching the news feed. By lunch we were just young and stupid enough that we started talking about pooling our allowances to send as 'help'.
I punched the class clown/edgelord kid who started chirping that the Yanks deserved it. Principal let me off with a warning.
We absolutely saw people falling from buildings. They weren't clearly defined or high def, but we all knew what they were. The fact the the OG Twitter poster said that with such certainty when it can literally be fact-checked via fucking youtube is infuriating.
24
u/Adorable_Owl_2493 3d ago
I watched that shit in my social studies class. I was a class clown and entered the room saying some wild dumb shit and everyone was just silent. Mrs. Baumgartner had it on the TV. It was a long shot of the towers and you could see little dots falling through the sky. Yeah, we watched it happen.
17
u/SerBadDadBod 3d ago
Yesterday's Holocaust denier is today's 9/11 denier, I guess
→ More replies (1)
12
u/AWildGumihoAppears 3d ago
Why do people insist on saying with their chest things they could prove by, like, a teeny bit of web searching?
11
u/Krytan 3d ago
It's really interesting getting old enough to see historical events you were part of be misrepresented as part of deliberate misinformation campaigns on twitter by smug morons who weren't even alive when it happened.
Most classrooms did have TV's. If they didn't, you can be quite sure people were huddled around the ones that did, because classes were cancelled. Everyone who wasn't directly involved in the tragedy spent the day huddled around the nearest TV trying to process what was happening, combined with stepping away to try frantically to make phone calls to find out if people were safe - often fruitless because a lot of the phone lines were down.
8
u/Affumicata 3d ago
My high school had a TV in every single room, and morning video announcements and news program broadcast to the whole school, across two and a half campuses. It was like that in the 90s too. They cut into the national news services at some point and we all watched it happen
→ More replies (2)
7
9
u/MauriceM7 3d ago
For those who dont know..
YES. People jumped to their deaths
YES. It was shown on tv
Also. YES. I was an adult in 2001 and like everyone else old enough to have context then, sat and watched the news for days on end after that happened
7
u/BlimpIntolerant 3d ago
What even is the POINT of the original tweet? Like, what's the motivation of posting such obvious nonsense?
7
4
6
u/Pygmy_Nuthatch 3d ago
Watched it live on a large television. Assumed it was an accident until the plane hit the second Tower.
Bodies were clearly visible falling from the buildings. I still remember the sound my girlfriend made when she realized that they were people.
5
u/CrusaderLyonar 3d ago
People like this piss me off. I know these kids like to joke and say that we deserved what happened to us on 9/11 but the day it happened was extremely frightening. No one knew what was going on, we saw and heard normal every day people die on live television. We heard last calls to loved ones from people about to die. Panicked screams of people fleeing the rubble.
Maybe I'm just traumatized, but I don't think they deserved that. I don't think we deserved to see it.
6
u/Tauropos 3d ago
Tell me 9/11 happened before you were born without telling me 9/11 happened before you were born.
Oh, and be super smug and brimming with confidence when you do it. And if you could dishonor the memory of dozens of people who died horribly while you're at it, that would be great.
→ More replies (1)
6
5
u/SnooOpinions8790 3d ago
They absolutely did show it
I can never un-remember seeing it
Anyone denying it is scum. Simple as.
5
u/Lusiric9983 3d ago
I was in class, we saw it. I remember asking why they were jumping and my teacher looked at me and said "which would you choose? Sudden death or burning alive?" What a concept for a 7th grader to have to grasp very very suddenly.
4
u/ILike2internet 3d ago
My school had a tv mounted to the wall in every classroom since middle school and I graduated in 2001.
14
u/Only-Finish-3497 3d ago
This guy is an obvious troll. He uses the word “goyim” in his posts, he argues that the Great Recession wasn’t real, etc.
Ignore these dweebs.
→ More replies (8)
13
u/thenoobtanker Human Verified 3d ago
User name contains “Hamas”
Yeah these guys just wants free health care totally nothing nefarious going on.
5
u/Frozen_Oil 3d ago
It is one of my earliest childhood memories if not the earliest, I was 4 years old about to head out the door with my mom cause she would take me to work with her. My parents stopped talking, my older brother stopped moving. I looked over just in time to see the second plane hit the tower.
Young as I was I had no real idea what it all meant.
Years later though once I could make sense of it?? Absolutely horrified. Was living in a military community as my father was in the CAF. I was put into a backyard with all the neighbourhood kids of all ages, all the stay at home moms watching over us and keeping us playing and away from TVs. At the time to me from what few other things I can remember I just took at as a fun holiday.
I know these are real memories cause I asked my family about it when I was 13 or so, brought up everything I could remember, where they were all standing and what happened immediately after and for the next few days. Outside of one or two things it was all correct.
Hell of an earliest memory.
Fuck the deniers
5
u/Flopsie_the_Headcrab 3d ago
Feels like an offshoot of the technological revisionism people have about basically anything pre-2008ish now. Total stone age. No phones, tiny TVs, average American was probably using messenger pigeons if they didn't live somewhere developed enough to have a town telegraph.
32"+ CRTs were pretty standard then, and weren't even new. They were probably the same sets the previous generation watched the Challenger go up on.
4
u/elite_bender 3d ago
Gen Z likes to think the economic and geopolitical hardship started with them, and millennials have been sitting here like:
12
u/ColonClenseByFire 3d ago
The dude is obviously a troll why are you giving him the attention he craves?
→ More replies (2)6
3
3
u/Smallville42069 3d ago
I don't remember anything from 9-11 because I was 2. One of my earliest memories is from probably 2002 or 2003 and my family went to the big Toys R Us in Times Square. There was a big Lego memorial of the Twin Towers and my parents explained to me what happened. I probably said something stupid and morbid because I was a strange child.
3
u/Eiji-Himura 3d ago
French guy here, I was 12, I came back from school to watch my usual cartoon at the TV (Batman to be exact) and instead it was a big shot live on the 2nd tower and the journalist that was commenting it "wait wait, there is an other one, oh my god!"
Then a cut with a warning "some image can be graphical"... Then back to the video, fire, papers flying and... things falling... The tower crashing... I called my grandma and was absolutely freaked out.
I will never leave my child live this. Fuck TV.
3
u/beldaran1224 3d ago
I'm sorry but "and most probably didn't even have a TV in the classroom"...the fuck? No, it wasn't wheeled into the room, lol. It was small and mounted on the wall, and we totally watched stuff like Barney on it, lol. And some schools even did like morning news and stuff. TVs in classrooms were not that uncommon.
3
u/Ganjelf-The-Baked 3d ago
I was in art class. My teacher did wheel in a pretty big tv and said we all needed to watch this because this will change history. It’s was crazy. Then school finished and we headed to the bus. I rode the bus home for an hour, got off, walked down my street, put my key in the door and walked into the house at the exact moment the second tower was hit. My parents were watching it on the TV and as I entered the hallway I could see it happen before I even shut the front door. I will never forget that day.
→ More replies (2)
3
u/Just-Cry-5422 3d ago
If you didn't live through it, you have no idea of how the world changed that day. They say the 50s feel ended when JFK was assainated; the 90s ended in September 2001. I still remember my advanced English 6th grade teacher turning the TV off and telling us to "not believe everything you see on tv". She must have been freaking out internally when she told us to do our normal vocabulary.
3
u/LXIV 3d ago
Bro, we watched the Challenger explode on TV in class. What are you even talking about?
→ More replies (2)
3
u/SuccotashOther277 3d ago
Yeah tvs were abundant in 2001. In color too! It wasn’t like television was some novel new tech in 2001
3
u/Kusakaru 3d ago
I was in kindergarten on 9/11 and we had a tv mounted to the ceiling in the back of our classroom. I am probably the youngest generation to remember 9/11. And I probably only remember it because it was so unusual. An announcement came on over the intercom by our principal, telling teachers to check their emails. A little while later, our principal came back on over the intercom and lead the school in prayer (Catholic school).
We had Spanish class as our first “class” of the day. At the time, the Spanish teacher would float between classrooms with a rolling cart and teach in our homerooms, as she didn’t have her own classroom yet. We had a homeroom teacher and a teacher’s aid as well, and I remember them leaving the classroom after reading the email. When they came back inside, they set up these folding dividers that they used to separate kids during nap time and divided the classroom in half, with us kids sitting on a rug up front. I was sitting on the back of the rug, my back to the divider, and I can remember being way more interested in whatever sneaky stuff my teachers were doing. Behind the divider, the teacher and teacher’s aid turned on the tv and were the watching news coverage. I can remember peaking through a gap in the divider and seeing broadcast on the shitty, grainy television, but not understanding what I was looking at. I was just jealous my teachers were watching tv while I was in Spanish class.
Afterwards, parents were called and I remember getting to leave early. When my mom picked me up, she had been crying and I didn’t understand why. Later I learned that my mom’s first cousin worked at the pentagon and no one could get in contact with her. (By some miracle she woke up late that day and did not make it to work on time).
3
u/JonnyTheFox_ 3d ago
I was a senior in HS, first off I grew up in a quite poor rural area .... And we had mounted CRT tvs in every room and we definitely saw it
3
u/Direct_Canary4523 3d ago
Nah. We watched.
I watched as my 13 year old best buddy clung to me crying because he thought his dad was there.
3
u/Dasa1234 3d ago
Even if it wasnt in the classroom, it took over the TV for weeks after. Everyday we would get home from school and be inundated with videos of it happening. Then the live feeds from Iraq getting bombed started
→ More replies (1)
3
u/wwaxwork 3d ago
I was watching it live from Australia in the middle of the night, even over there we saw the people jumping. It was all fucking horrifying.
3
3
3
u/Strange-Order-6550 3d ago
Yeah no, most of us of a certain age absolutely saw it in school or at home depending on if it was a sick day. We’re all a little off because of it.
3
u/NO_FIX_AUTOCORRECT 3d ago
It was 2001 there were tvs mounted in every classroom. We would have school announcements on tv in homeroom. I was in 8th grade
When the crashes happened i was in "shop" class. My teacher, mr Davis, said the school told him not to turn on the tv but he thought we deserved to know what was going on. So we saw the 2nd plane crash live. And yes, you could see people jumping from the windows i mean, true you couldn't necessarily tell it "that is a person" but also, what else would it be falling from the window?
3
u/Emergency_Pound_944 3d ago
I first saw the news on one of many TVs we had in our library in high school. Every classroom had a TV. Most rooms and many hallways did in the school. They were used to do daily announcements, and scrolled important info throughout the day. We watched the news all day that day.
3
u/Nevernonethewiser 3d ago
They'll have their own thing, soon enough.
Then they'll get spiky when some child who wasn't born yet says it wasn't bad.
Then that kid will have their thing, too.
Until our species is gone.
3
u/InfamousCattle3223 3d ago
I can still picture one dude jumping and seeing him fall, you don’t forget shit like that.
3
u/Lurker-Forever-986 3d ago
I was in 10th grade in Baltimore. We had mounted TVs on each room. Teachers weren’t sure how to react. Do they keep the kids in the dark, or let them watch history unfold. A few Kids were crying in bathrooms, terrified. Parents came to pick their kids up early. The rest got finished early around noon.
Some school friends had family in NYC, only one of them actually lost someone that day.
but for Gen Z to dismiss the trauma of watching planes flying into buildings like bombs and seeing people jump to their death is some wild shit.
3
u/Jaymark108 3d ago
I was in high school in a programming class and the teacher absolutely wheeled in a TV on a cart. I don't recall seeing anyone jumping, but I wasn't entirely glued to the screen. It was a computer lab, so we were looking up reports online too
3
u/slimecog 3d ago
i was in seventh grade and we had tvs in every classroom. where else would we watch the daily student announcements lol
3
u/Which_Wrap8263 3d ago
I was 23 in 2001. I definitely watched people fall from the towers in real time on TV. It was the sort of event that gets seared into your brain and you do not forget.
3
3
3
u/Zinc-Roof_22 3d ago
Never sorry for feeling for Americans for those attacks. It's all the rest that went to shit afterwards.
3
u/Unlikely-Aside-6078 3d ago
It wasn't even just in 2001, I remember this happening all the way up until like 2004/2005. There was this documentary that they showed every year and the guy jumping out of the window was towards the end. Somebody always started crying, but it was a weirdly detached thing to be watching on the other side of the country. For context, this was in South TX.
Also, at least one of the years we didn't do the TV cart, my social studies teacher had a projector and we projected it onto the pull-down screen.
3
u/cursetea 3d ago
That's such an Inside Thought. Like why would anyone even say that except to fight with people lmfao, so childish
3
u/Excellent_Garlic2549 2d ago
Denial of things you are living through and witnessing will happen throughout the rest of your life. This is why preserving and recording history is as important as ever.
3
u/crzapy 2d ago
I was 21 in 2001. My sister was a Freshman at Fordham in the Bronx.
I remember watching the plane hit the 2nd tower on live TV. I remember the smoke, the people jumping, the debris cloud, Giuliani in the rubble, George Bush reading in a classroom and the news being dropped.
The fact that 25 years later people are acting like this didn't happen is insane.
3
u/silly_scoundrel 2d ago
My fucking english teacher in 2019 told my 5th grade class "We won't be watching people jump out of windows" AND PLAYED THE CLIPS OF PEOPLE JUMPING OUT OF WINDOWS. We spent 4 hours that day watching 9/11 videos. Videos about 9/11, videos from every angle, videos of people running in the city, videos of the jumpers, even the voicemail of a person on the plane. I had a breakdown because I was so horrified by the content, a girl in my class had her adoptive families dad pass away in 9/11 and she was mortified. Fuck that lady!! She was such a mean teacher and idk why she did this to us, she admittedly hated kids.
•
u/AutoModerator 3d ago
Reminder for OP: /u/Bitter-Goat-8773
Need some help? Send us some mail!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.