FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for September 12, 2023

Day late, could have switched this with yesterday’s strip

Youth has an unfortunate tendency to dismiss anything outside their personal experience. They refuse to watch “old movies”, read “old” books, listen to “old” music. The irony is that to a 20 year old today, 9/11 is not “real”.

Some of us were going through their own traumas and 9/11 doesn’t seem real.

It’s interesting how it has been presented over the years since.

Reminds me of a friend who was a teaching assistant for a university “history” class. She said that it felt weird when they started on the Vietnam War, which for her had been current events.

Then she got the professor to invite some folks who had lived through it to give talks to the class… and not just soldiers, but noncombatants and even draft resisters. Very different from reading a textbook.

Unsurprizingly, Peter missed the real lesson.

Many have no concept of how the past affects the present. They’re just cognizant of what is happening today and think it just comes into existence. The histoey teacher has to try and tie the 2 together.

add and ‘s’ to the word ‘year’ in the second panel and this comic would stay current for years… hope you run it every year… ‘’ lest we forget…..’’

Hah! Yeah. I remember how it felt when I was taking an elective history course in high school: Russian and East Asian History. We barely scratched the surface on history, because it was 1991 and we ended up all tied up with current events.

Talk about it in school now and it will indeed be seen as just another historical event that occurred before the students were born. Which does make me wonder why some history teachers still insist on giving it special treatment in their classes.

It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that almost everyone remembered 9/11 and could say what they were doing on that day. But with it being 22 years ago, there are now young adults who have no firsthand memories of the day.

At the government agency where I spent my career, some of my colleagues and I used to talk once in a while about our experiences on 9/11. That day left a big impression on those of us who were around then, because we not only worked in DC, but our agency, at that time, was just across the Potomac River from the Pentagon. On 9/11, a bunch of us had gathered in a conference room to watch news coverage from New York as things started to happen there. The conference room had big windows looking over toward the Pentagon. None of us in that room actually saw the plane hit the Pentagon, but we saw the smoke starting to rise just after it happened. The day quickly evolved.

Several years later, I started feeling like it might be time to consider retirement when my colleagues and I were having a 9/11 conversation, and one of the young lawyers I supervised said that she was in elementary school on 9/11.

Still too soon…

Just illiustrated why this country is in such a mess.

That was in 2002, now in 2023 it’s history so it’s OK…

Our lives were forever changed after 9/11. Older folks were inconvenienced flying but for younger ones it’s par for the course

He meant relevant to their generation which is a mistake that many of us make when it comes to History…..

Peter….sigh.

Other than the actual event, the most striking 9/11 memory I have is later meeting a survivor on the LIRR. He and his wife both worked in the towers, but different offices. He was outside doing a quick errand when the planes hit. All he could do was watch in horror as the buildings collapsed. In tears he walked the few blocks to a favorite restaurant where he and his wife had just had an anniversary. And there she was!

He then related how various security measures were now impacting their lives, but upon remembering all the friends he lost that day, he said, “Shame on me for complaining”.

Nailed it.

I had just turned 5 yo when Pearl Harbor was bombed and I still remember that we were coming home from church when we heard about it on the car radio. Our grandson was spending the day with us on 9/11 and he was almost 6 yo, so when I saw the second plane hit the tower I called him in to watch what was going on because I knew that someday he would remember where he was on that day.