Well, perhaps I spoke too soon about no one posting anything anymore. My future accomplice in crime¹ has started a new blog/newsletter, in the year of—checks calendar—2025.²

Welcome Lindsey! Soon we can get our webring started and start talking in the forums.

Lindsey’s inaugural post is about where she was during 9/11.

where were you…

Well, Where Was I?

My memory is blurry but, I remember being home, I was about to start as a Freshman at OSU commuting from my parent’s house. I don’t think classes had started yet or they were about to shortly³. I think I woke up after the plane hit the first tower. My mom must have woken me.

This was at the point where I had broadband internet (and free cable from the aforementioned broadband internet). I think I tuned into CNN to watch the subsequent attacks in realtime. I don’t remember much else from that day other being somewhat scared and watching the news. No one knew exactly what was happening. It was all speculation for a while. This was also well before you could follow events like this reliably on the internet. There was no social media. This whole time period for me is a blur mostly because I was already deeply overwhelmed about college.

I do remember the subsequent weeks where it seemed like that an almost propagandized sense of patriotism became true. A moment of mass trauma response where people seemed to care about one another. That quickly subsided as American muslims were targeted and things like the Patriot Act⁴ were put into law.

I do remember starting to follow politics a bit more (as I really hadn’t while I was in high school).

I do think of it as a milestone moment in history, much like the COVID-19 pandemic is in the most recent past. Things were different after that. Hard to detail specifics, but things were definitely just different culturally after that moment.⁵

1. As we’ve definitely not committed any crimes yet. ↩︎
2. That can’t be right. ↩︎
3. Back when OSU was on quarters, not semesters. ↩︎
4. Which I do believe is a turning point to how we got to NOW. ↩︎
5. For example how everyone noticed films or TV shows that featured the Twin Towers, or how they had to change things like the Spider-Man movie in response. ↩︎