I was in middle school when 9/11 happened and it was basically like a switch got flipped

The same teachers who were bemoaning us loving Pokemon and playing on our Game Boys were making us watch live footage of people dying and telling us that everything was going to be fine

One of the gym teachers had a breakdown and started to cry, half of the kids started to point and laugh at him

Everyone started making up rumors about who did it, #1 runner was aliens

For six hours, I sat in a room clutching my backpack, looking at my comic books and trading cards, waiting for my parents to come pick me up early as the rest of my class slowly filtered out as their parents arrived

My teacher came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder and said "Are you okay? You've been really quiet today and that's not like you."

It became suddenly apparent that nothing good was ever going to happen again

"I'm okay" I managed to get out, "it's just a lot to think about"

I went home a short while later, we got KFC for dinner.

When everyone was on dial-up, that would add another minute to the load time of the site. The internet was slow as hell in 2001. And that goes for the web hosts as well - on 9/11, all of the news sites ended up posting simple static pages because they were getting hammered by visitors.

56k no way!

They used to put this warning in the title of threads with lots of large images as a warning to those still on 56k modems

Same, but for me it was listening to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8P9TaEIWjw a while ago that really changed my mind. Before, I thought the war on terror was a very opportunistic endeavor that most Americans only went along with because it was the solution the government put in front of them. But I was wrong, the islamophobia runs a lot deeper and people were calling for genocide minutes after the second plane hit.