That shit was a core memory for me, too - I was in middle school when 9/11 went down, and high school during the Iraq invasion and war. I remember feeling weird about signing up for selective service (it’s a compulsory holdover from the draft era, if you aren’t aware), and being moderately concerned that I’d be plucked for deployment to the Middle East if some political dipshit decided they needed more meatbags for the grinder. It absolutely sped up my political coming of age.
Side note: I now struggle to take the popular outrage at the event seriously, in light of the fact that during peak covid, there were a couple weeks where we were losing a 9/11’s worth of people across the US every single fucking day. Call me callous if you will, but the popular reaction to that of “fuck you I won’t wear a mask or get a vaccine but I’ll inject bleach and take ivermectin” kind of broke me in terms of having any faith whatsoever in the broader American populace. Huge swaths of my countrymen don’t give a single shit about anything unless it either affects them very directly, or it’s a splashy MCU-esque story.
That shit was a core memory for me, too - I was in middle school when 9/11 went down, and high school during the Iraq invasion and war. I remember feeling weird about signing up for selective service (it’s a compulsory holdover from the draft era, if you aren’t aware), and being moderately concerned that I’d be plucked for deployment to the Middle East if some political dipshit decided they needed more meatbags for the grinder. It absolutely sped up my political coming of age.
Side note: I now struggle to take the popular outrage at the event seriously, in light of the fact that during peak covid, there were a couple weeks where we were losing a 9/11’s worth of people across the US every single fucking day. Call me callous if you will, but the popular reaction to that of “fuck you I won’t wear a mask or get a vaccine but I’ll inject bleach and take ivermectin” kind of broke me in terms of having any faith whatsoever in the broader American populace. Huge swaths of my countrymen don’t give a single shit about anything unless it either affects them very directly, or it’s a splashy MCU-esque story.