this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
293 points (99.3% liked)
Tumblr
254 readers
623 users here now
Welcome to /c/Tumblr
All the chaos of Tumblr, without actually going to Tumblr.
Rule 1: Be Civil, Not Cursed
This isn’t your personal call-out post.
- No harassment, dogpiling, or brigading
- No bigotry (transphobia, racism, sexism, etc.)
- Keep it fun and weird, not mean-spirited
Rule 2: No Forbidden Posts
Some things belong in the drafts forever. That means:
- No spam or scams
- No porn or sexually explicit content
- No illegal content (don’t make this a federal case)
- NSFW screenshots must be properly tagged
If you see a post that breaks the rules, report it so the mods can handle it. Otherwise just reblog and relax.
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I remember being in the 5th grade when it happened and thinking "Why is everyone freaking out so much about this? Like, sure it sucks but I see stuff like this when my mom watches the news all the time. What's different about it? I mean, there aren't even any tanks involved in this"
What I had seen on the news was most likely the various post-Yugoslavia conflicts in the Balkans throughout the 1990's and into the 2000's, although there were probably other conflicts around the world that my 10-year-old mind just filed away as "wars are happening in far-off places". A lot of my classmates at the time were Bosnians who were displaced in the Bosnian wars.
There were 2,977 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, including the attackers. For reference, there were 42,196 fatalities from car accidents in 2001. That means 9/11 was less than a full month's worth of car crashes. Imagine if we put anywhere near as much money and energy into making automobiles safer as we did to bomb brown people in unrelated countries for the next 20 years afterwards.
The attacks were not sensationalized because of the human loss, but the economic loss. Kill hundreds of thousands of poor people and no one bats an eye. Kill a couple of rich people and the whole media empire makes sure we stop at nothing to bomb unrelated countries in response.
I'm only a year older than you. I thought the point was that now on domestic soil, they're able to do stuff like this and that we are no longer safe and "stuff that happens overseas and far away" could potentially happen here.
And then, it wasn't much longer after that, maybe a year, that I realized that the big deal was that we keep pushing people around globally and pissing people off and making enemies and, "innocent" individuals aside, we, as the USA, probably deserved it.
'Probably'
America worked so hard for that.
Americans deserve it like Russians deserve it. That being, yes, but also no. Many of the Russian people are, in fact, only guilty of innocent ignorance. As a northerner in the US, I try to remain optimistic and think that the vast majority of people, including the South here in the US, are the same; people can only act on what they know, and if you're fed ignorance and fear your entire lives, to you, you might be doing the ethical thing.
I truly do believe that basically everybody is trying to do the right thing. It just comes down to who is backed into a corner, who has been tricked into the kill-or-be-killed mindset, and scarcity (or even only artificial/perceived scarcity) of resources.
The problem is when there are people in high places corrupting every system they touch, and those who believe they're exceptions. Even racists are just deeply ignorant people, probably believing they're doing the right thing for the human species and community. And then, obviously, the compounding biases blinding them to reality. And this doesn't make them inferior, they're human, just like the rest of us, and prisoners to their circumstances.
No. Lots¹ of Americans are vicious hateful fucking orcs³. It's not just about wanting to win; its about being willing to lose if you can make the other hurt worse. The ones who are upset with trump say 'He's hurting the wrong people!' not 'He was supposed to help us!'.
You've never seen these orcs interact with someone they knew was queer or a poc. That which they do not understand must be violently dominated or destroyed. Creating enough of a model to understand the other is a kind of attack/desecration on/of their very souls, and my existence is ontologically evil precisely because they could attempt to understand me and be made however fractionally impure.³
They can't be talked with² negotiated with compromised with or cooperated with by their own choice. They are philosophically exterminationist, even if they haven't read any philosophy, and many have narrowed themselves to vessels of that.
¹i don't know about most, but I live here too
²meaningfully. You can exchange words but what you say to your house plants is more meaningful.
³not that the people you're talking about don't exist. The homophobic redneck who thinks eating pussy is just something you do for your best friend when you get bored, and of course she loves her friends, and no she hasnt had a boyfriend in a while, because 'men aren't worth the trouble, why change the subject so sudden like that?'⁴, or the guy who thinks ’black people have super strength in like an x-men kinda way so they probably get paid extra for warehouse jobs; that seems pretty handy! Unless they have to hide it for secret identities or something. That must be hard!’⁴ it's just that other kind exist too.
⁴i have met this person.
🫂
There is no need to qualify that statement about Americans. I can vouch for it as an American.
I was in high school and had the same thought. If a few thousand people dying gets you this mad you must be absolutely livid every day. I remember making a joke about it a year after it happened and the person I was talking to, who didn’t lose anyone and wasn’t pro-war or anything, got so mad about it. I decided never to bring it up again because apparently everyone was hypnotized by a news broadcast of it that I missed, and the whole country was agreed that this specific attack was the worst thing that had ever happened anywhere to anyone.
I can’t stop thinking “Shouldn’t you guys be so much more angry at the preventable COVID deaths? There were so, so many and our president at the time told us not to wear masks or quarantine. Surely the death toll should be generally related to the anger?”