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[Cthulhu]

I was 10, in fifth grade.  The teacher came in and said two planes had hit the world trade center, one hit the pentagon, and one hit camp david.  She said it was an accident (I still don't know how she could've thought something like that was an accident  One plane sure, but four?).  Then recess started and we could go or we could stay and watch the news.  Only two went to recess and they were the class delinquents so nobody was surprised.  A kid I know said he thought Iraq did it.

[MaximumZero]

I was in second grade.

Congrats.  You just made me feel old.

You damn kids, get off my lawn! I was hunting for a job.

I don't know if this makes me a horrible, unpatriotic, heartless bastard, but I was really hoping that the grieving process mentioned earlier would be over by now. We didn't celebrate the ten year anny of Three Mile Island, or Hurricane Andrew, or any other disaster. Hell, the most recent wave of hurricanes and wildfires will be out of the average American's thought processes in less than a month, if they weren't directly affected. I don't honestly understand why we keep dragging this tragedy and the people affected by it back into our field of view. Sure, we never really got to "Mission Accomplished", and we probably never will...but we need to let go as a nation if we are to ever truly heal.

[TherosPherae]

Just to defy all those who say "everyone will remember where they were when they heard it," my brain has decided to place it in my 3rd grade classroom. 3rd grade me walks into the class wondering (basically) why everyone's flipping their shit. However, chronologically, it should have been when I was in 1st grade. Hrm.

[Aqizzar]

At that age, stuff gets confused.  I've got some blended memories like that myself, don't worry about it.

Sure, we never really got to "Mission Accomplished", and we probably never will...but we need to let go as a nation if we are to ever truly heal.

Not that celebrating a man's death is every a good thing, but if nothing else, Osama bin Laden is accounted for.

I've been thinking about that lately.  After September 11th, I heard his name a couple of times and I got curious.  A few days later, I was in the library and looked up his name on Yahoo - at there time there were only a few thousand returns instead of dozens of millions.  One of the first was for a book that I got addicted to reading, then I got a new version in print a couple years later.  My mother thought that was a sign that I should major in Political Science, and the rest is history.

In a small way, 9/11 kinda made me who I am, if not through any particularly poignant means.  That in mind, I think it's odd how little I think about it.

[Cthulhu]

It's a lot different from Pearl Harbor in a lot of ways.  I'm pretty much over it but I can see why a lot of people would still think it's a huge deal.  Pearl Harbor was during a war, even if we weren't fighting in that war.  It was on a military base.  It was a military attack.  We could go all gung-ho Captain America and beat the shit out of the people who did it. This was completely different, an unprovoked attack out of nowhere that killed thousands of innocent people, committed by a faceless enemy that couldn't be beaten with traditional American asskicking.  All those horrible pictures and videos of fire and destruction and people jumping out of windows, that shit's traumatizing and when it's so unexpected like this it can make you never feel truly safe again.  The fact that the wars everyone expected to vindicate have been bad and that Al Qaeda is still operating just makes it worse.

I think eventually it'll be like Pearl Harbor, an important historical event but not something you still cry about.  It'll just take a while.

[mainiac]

I wasn't commenting on the strength of the emotion about Pearl Harbor so much as the type of emotion on display.  Nobody ever talked about the sacred ground zero of Pearl Harbor and how we shouldn't let Japanese people do anything it AFAIK.  People made songs about Pearl Harbor that were calls to action while people made songs about 9/11 that were about the pain it evoked.

[inteuniso]

I was six. My mom woke me up (I was living on the other side of the world) to watch the TV. I didn't grasp at the time what had just happened.

It will be remembered in the american psyche better than pearl harbor though.  It was an attack on civilians, using a civilian vehicles to blow up more civilians. It wasn't an act of war, it was an act of terrorism. It wasn't meant to cripple America, it was meant to show that we're vulnerable, that there's a crack in the armor, that we're not invincible.

I still wonder if they at least partially succeeded.

[Zrk2]

I was in grade one or two, and the teacher gave us some vague explanation about it.

What I wish they had done was built them exactly the same, only with a giant "Fuck you" painted on top.

[fqllve]

I wasn't commenting on the strength of the emotion about Pearl Harbor so much as the type of emotion on display.  Nobody ever talked about the sacred ground zero of Pearl Harbor and how we shouldn't let Japanese people do anything it AFAIK.  People made songs about Pearl Harbor that were calls to action while people made songs about 9/11 that were about the pain it evoked.

Well, I don't think anyone tried to build a kabuki theater anywhere near Pearl Harbor but I see your point. Then again, it's really hard to say what the reaction to Pearl Harbor was a decade later without asking someone who was alive at the time. I know people were furious about it, but that's about it. The emotional response was less crying eagles and more retaliatory, but again, 9/11 was an attack on civilians and it wasn't immediately obvious who we should retaliate against.

[Angel Of Death]

I didn't know of it until about 4 or 5 years later. By then, I didn't really care at all.

[Il Palazzo]

I was 19 and angsting over an unrequitted love or somesuch nonsense, so I couldn't be bothered about another terrorist attack half a world away, even if this time it was not the usual not-Western country.
The angst went away with time, but I still can't bring myself to understand people who say that 9/11 "changed the way we think about the world", as I keep hearing in the news. I'd happily sign my name under a statement saying that what USA had been doing after 9/11 changed the way we think about USA.

[Bohandas]

At that age, stuff gets confused.  I've got some blended memories like that myself, don't worry about it.

Sure, we never really got to "Mission Accomplished", and we probably never will...but we need to let go as a nation if we are to ever truly heal.

Not that celebrating a man's death is every a good thing, but if nothing else, Osama bin Laden is accounted for.

I disagree.

In fact, I've even celebrated the deaths of people orders of magnitude less evil than Bin Laden.

[Sensei]

Nothing but 9/11 on the news channel, rather bugs me.

[PsyberianHusky]

Maybe it is different for those who live in New York, and had to deal with an empty ground zero.

[Vector]

6th grade, eleven years old.  It was playing on the TV as I left the house and walked with my mom down to the bus stop; back then, my cousin and her girlfriend were living with her kitten in my room for a month, so I slept in a closet.  They were the ones who had gotten up to watch TV.  I was kind of hustled out of the house, and I saw pretty much no footage of the event thereafter because I didn't watch TV myself, in general.  The bus was basically empty, so for once I didn't have to sit in the back... there were maybe three kids on it, and I ended up being one of the only kids in my class, too.  We made a big deal of saying the Pledge of Allegiance like we usually had to every single damned morning.

I mostly remember anniversary things with local popular girls making tear-filled speeches, and one of my friends asking her boyfriend out on 9/11 of last year and thus cementing my annoyance with the day for the next, oh, long while.

It wasn't a very important day for me or anyone else I know.