Kids entering high school this fall weren’t alive during the 9/11 attacks.
Good. I’m looking forward to when they start voting.
I don’t remember the 9/11 attacks…
I do remember the endless flow of news about “what on earth is our government up to now” afterwards (on the one hand, hyperlexia means I can read my parents’ copies of the Funny Times, on the other hand, I should really have read some more apolitical material when I was younger, and maybe if you think I’m not mature enough to read about my own autism).
On the other hand, I cannot remember not having the “War on Terror”, and I hear enough complaining about it that it doesn’t seem like a good standard to me but it basically feels normal. This, uh, may not be a positive feature that will lead to my cohort making good voting decisions.
But you’re right that I’m not panicking about “terrorists”, I’m more concerned that one of my friends will end up being accused of being one, or that sometime I will have a meltdown at an airport and I won’t catch myself and hitting my head against a wall will look suspicious, or that information derived from mass surveillance will be used for more malicious purposes than it’s currently being used for (ah, yes, this “have an autism-specific tracking device program” will never go wrong when we keep getting accused of every mass shooting committed by a white person ever and people running mass surveillance tend to have worse data security than I would like and people have committed anti-autistic hate crimes in the past, nothing is likely to lead to harm here).
Coincidentally enough, I was just wondering yesterday how much you knew about 9/11. (As an extension of wondering how much my brother knows, since he’s roughly the same age as you.)
I, for one, spent a significant portion of my childhood and adolescence wishing someone would teach me about late-20th-century history. I mostly had to gather vague impressions from media and conversations designed, not to teach, but to evoke memories that I didn’t share.
Despite the clear evocation focus of the title, I found Where Were You When? to be helpful. Unfortunately, it stops at the new millennium. This was fine for me, because my first-hand experience with historical events starts at the new millennium, but not so good for anyone even slightly younger than me.
(I keep meaning to find a webpage that gives the lyrics of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and links each lyric to its Wikipedia article. I’m sure there must be some, and it would be a reasonable place to look for further details. Of course, that ends even earlier.)
My understanding of recent historical events is, while still probably not ideal, usually good enough. I still run into some trouble hanging out with groups of people 5 – 10 years older than me who implicitly expect everyone involved to be familiar with 90′s pop culture. (I spent the 90′s variously non-existent, pre-sapient, and not paying much attention to the world outside my family.)
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