As someone around for 9-11 and the “NEVER FORGET NUMBER #1 GREATEST TRAGEDY EVER IN HISTURY” response to it I am in thrilled and invigorated by the fact that younger people just make amogus memes and TikTok nonsense about it. A huge chunk of America cared more about it than any entire genocide and thought you would cry learning about it. They hoped it’d make every generation patriotically angry forever and ever and want to join the military. Instead you Photoshop the towers into squidwards house and shit. Never stop lol
I’m physically unable to take 9/11 seriously, entirely because my grade 9 english teacher was bizarrely obsessed with it. We basically had an entire unit on 9/11. We watched that documentary from those students that were doing a documentary of firefighters and wound up getting the only footage of the first plane hitting. We did a novel study of a book about some kid being in one of the towers for take your kid to work day and him and his dad squeezing past the wreckage of the plane to escape in time. We watched that Nic Cage movie of him being a firefighter during 9/11 that gets stuck in an elevator shaft when the place collapses. I am dead fucking serious, we had to make up fictional people that died in the attack, write an obituary for our 9/11sona’s, and then write and deliver a eulogy as their grief-stricken parent. At one point in the unit the teacher clarified that she hadn’t personally lost anyone to the attack, nor was she anywhere near New York when it happened. She never bothered to ask if any of us had actually lost someone in the attack, which kind of seems like a thing you should do before making us invent fictional victims to give eulogies for. The unit began with her demanding to know where we all were on the day of the attack and what we remembered, and she started crying when we told her that 1. we were two years old at the time and couldn’t remember shit fuck, the closest thing was one of the older kids kind of thought they remembered being very confused at adults freaking out over the TV but that could have been literally anything, and so this meant that 2. we were the last class she would ever teach that could possibly remember 9/11. Probably didn’t help that someone pointed out that we were the class born in 1999, so in two years she’d have students that hadn’t even been born during 9/11. That may have contributed to the teacher crying over the whole thing.
Look, Penelope. Look. There is nobody out here. Nobody. Do you see that? Do you see that? Look- Look over here. There’s nobody. Look over here. There’s nobody! There is nobody out here.
End transcript.]
me reading the end of the odyssey
(Penelope is a small black chihuahua, roughly the size of three bagels, and is being held out at arm’s length.)
