Do you remember 9/11?

[Crumpets]

Mostly a "how old are you?" type question, but also curious to see if it has effected anybody's politics. Personally, I'm option two. I was 7 and watched the news reports on TV.

[The Dowager Mod]

Dunno if it was "firsthand" or not but I was about 25 miles north of Manhattan on 9/11, could clearly see the smoke.

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

Yes, I was very young but I had a vague understanding of what had just happened.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

No. Not at all really. I remember on some level the invasion of Iraq, but 9/11 clearly made very little impact on my mind. (I was six years old)

[Bigby]

I was 7 when I saw what happened on the news. I was preparing to go to school that day.

[SWE]

I had recently turned 2, so no.

[Torie]

Yes, I remember it of course. I woke up to the radio saying the second tower had been hit. No, it did not affect my politics, other than I was annoyed by the extreme over reaction to it all. If they had just kept the God damned door shut to the cockpit, it would not have happened. We have been over reacting ever since.

[TNF]

Yes, I was in 5th grade.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

I was only in kindergarten but I remember the day, and more importantly, a solid month of coverage after it, very vividly.

I remember the following:
-My mom taking me home from school early, saying that the "twin towers" were hit by planes. Having no idea what the WTC was, I'd imagined a castle got hit by a plane that somehow went through both towers without damage and landing somewhere.
-My autistic brother (who had just turned three) was at home with his visiting therapists, who were close friends of my mom and stayed over for several hours to watch the events.
-My grandmother, who at that point was 59, also came over and later took me and my middle brother to her apartment where we watched cartoons while she sat on the porch smoking and talking to all of her sisters on the phone, only coming to change the channel every ten minutes or so to Fox. I vividly remember the "Attack on America" logo being on the screen, though I doubt I could actually read it at the time so I'd imagine she read it too me.
-My dad came home around 3:00 PM, about four hours earlier than usual. He picked us up in his truck and took us home and tried to explain what happened, though I have no recollection of what was said besides more talk of this mysterious "twin towers."
-Finally, I remembered a solid month of loop play of the second plane hitting the tower. I remember complaining that they talked about it too much as I was only accustomed at that point to the five minute segments of the local news.

Needless to say, while I remember about 65% of what happened that day, I don't think my life was changed in any way. I was only five years old.

[Goldwater]

Not really. I was 6 at the time and only had a very vague understand of what was going on.

[TDAS04]

Yeah, I was in 8th grade, understood what was going on.

[DavidB.]

Yes, I remember it. I came home from school and my mother was shocked, saying the Third World War might have been started. I saw it on television (that's when I learned the word "Pentagon"). Then my mom gave me a ride to my swimming lesson while calling with my father and talking about it all the time. It was absurd. I knew it was something big, just like I knew it was something big when Pim Fortuyn got killed and when Theo van Gogh got killed (but in the latter case I was already somewhat older).

I don't think it affected my politics, I was a bit too young and afterwards, I was opposed to the Iraq war when I was young (just because everybody was, probably). It influenced my politics that Theo van Gogh was killed, though. It made me understand the importance of free speech and the danger Islam poses to free speech and Western freedom in general.

[Clark Kent]

No, which is strange, because I remember the 2000 election.

[they don't love you like i love you]

Found out in English class, 2nd period. Just about all classes later that day were just watching news coverage. Senior year.

[NewYorkExpress]

Yes, but it's quite hazy, seeing as I was only seven at the time...

[Thunderbird is the word]

Yes, I was in seventh grade. I remember hearing conflicting reports all day in school about the World Trade Center being on fire but I had no bad how it was until my dad picked me up and mentioned that the World Trade Center was gone which just baffled me. I wouldn't say it effected my politics a whole lot as I didn't really have any strong political convictions at that point other then basically just being a Democrat for family reasons though in the long run my worldview formed largely in response and opposition to the ensuing war in Iraq and Patriot Act.

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

I remember the invasion of Iraq much better.  I enjoyed watching the news back then because there were tanks and guns and missiles which all seemed really cool to me.  I genuinely thought that Iraqis were going to show up at my house in rural Kentucky and I was really scared.  I was scared of "the son of the llama," as one of my classmates called him, too.

[Mr. Smith]

Yup, 3rd grade.

Woke up, ate breakfast, and as I was going up the stairs to get ready for school when my folks called me over to their room, it was on the news.

[NeverAgain]

No, it wasn't until I was about 4 that I understood what had happened  (I was one at the time)

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

Seeing as I didnt watch the news at age 7, I actually found out the next day when a boy in my vocabulary group told us that everyone in New York City had died. Needless to say I was distraught upon finding out effectively my whole family was dead (as were others in the small group). But my true memory begins and ends there. Some faint memories are surely false constructs or pure coincidences. J don't have many actual memories before age 8.

[ElectionsGuy]

No. My mom actually got mad at me for not knowing when I was 6.

[kcguy]

Obviously I remember, but it's very disjointed.  I had a seminar scheduled for 9:00 CDT that day.

I remember my boss mentioning to our office manager, when he arrived, that a plane had hit the WTC.

I had NPR on in my car when I was driving to my seminar.  They were talking to a correspondent about the Pentagon's reaction to what was happening in NYC.  In the middle of the interview, the correspondent said she had to go because fire alarms were going off.

We were in the middle of the seminar, when a woman walked into the room and interrupted us, telling us that one of the towers had fallen.

Mid-morning, we took a break from the seminar, and I wandered into the facility's break room.  CNN was showing what looked like pictures of a bombed-out war zone.

As far as my politics go, I was on the same page as the rest of the population for the first 24-36 hours.  Bush gave a speech about a week afterwards, which I would have given a B+ to, but I think I was already beginning to react to the right wing's equating of "anti-Republican" with "anti-American".  That pretty much destroyed any vestigial sympathy I had for the Republican Party.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

No. Not at all really. I remember on some level the invasion of Iraq, but 9/11 clearly made very little impact on my mind. (I was six years old)

^^^

And my family discusses the news (and the world in general) a lot, so not talking about this at all is a bit unusual, or I might've actually remembered something. I still cannot get my parents to talk about that day (or that time period in general).

[Hatman 🍁]

Man, I feel old. I was in grade 9 (Canadian English for "ninth grade"). Like BRTD, it was my second class of the day and it was English. We listened to it on the radio.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

I walked as close as you could get to ground zero a couple of months later. There was still smoke coming up from underground fires. And even though it was 3AM or so, they were actively demolishing buildings.