so like. i joke a lot, about basically everything… and i’m not gonna stop joking, because it’s how we cope with a lot of shit.

but here’s a little flash of serious.

my honest feelings about 9/11, as a USAmerican who was just barely an adult in 2001

aside from the messy tangle of big-scale thoughts and feelings around the whole thing

(the senseless deaths of three-thousand-ish people… the greater atrocities of the US throughout history that contributed, in so many ways, to the circumstances that led other nations to want to attack a US target like this… the further atrocities that the US later ended up using that same attack to justify)

there’s also a feeling that this was kinda my awakening to…. well, i guess, to being conscious of the truly batshit concepts of priorities and ethics that tend to be considered normal.

i mean, this isn’t to deny that I can kinda understand where we get these concepts. there’s comprehensible chains of events, throughout history, that you can see lead to people’s habit of thinking stuff like:

“yeah we don’t care about millions and millions of people dying and suffering in familiar, slow ways, as incidental collateral damage from the function of big faceless systems we’re all somewhat complicit in, which can easily replace any of the living cogs in their machine and would take many decades of slow, boring cooperation to dismantle.

….However, we care a whole lot if a much smaller number of people die in a sudden, unfamiliar way, in a deliberate attack that we can blame on a specific person or small group outside our own, and act like killing this target will instantly fix the whole problem.”

like.

i can look at the past and see how this became a habit. Sorta.

but.

it doesn’t change how much of a mindfuck it is, to be a somewhat sheltered autistic young adult in the first couple years of college (just beginning, at this time, to use your very first private internet connection, and see viewpoints outside your family and school and the media they provided you) ….and very suddenly have to realize this.

at the time, i remember it came up in my mind mostly as “why the fuck am I not feeling what everyone else expects me to feel”

(and maybe a bit of, “how many people really do feel what they’re expected to feel about this? how much of all supposedly normal emotion is just performative? and is there any way I could ever actually know? and how much does it matter, practically speaking”)

but in retrospect, after percolating a long time in my brain

it also set the stage for thoughts like, “why do we tolerate things from the Disney corporation that we’d forever-boycott any individual author or artist for,” or “why do i see more news about this one high-profile shooting than the endless mass-murder committed passively by our shitshow of a healthcare system”

it put everything in a new, hideous light that you can’t unsee

but. …still not sure how special it was, objectively.

i can only imagine that there have been other, equally hideously iluminating events for others coming of age, every year since then.