I have been reading the skepticism of those not alive during that time. They don’t understand about our shared ‘ trauma’.
That it seems ‘ too much’.

Arial view of WTC in March of 2001

uturistic_Fudge
@FudgeFuturistic
Sep 4
People born pre-9/11 have such a weird, worshipful attitude about it.
7:06 AM · Sep 8, 2026

I think they should sit down and be quiet.
The media landscape was far different in 2001 than it is now. Social Media was different. Basically non-existent.
The trauma of that day.
I can remember that I was pulling into my job when I heard a snippet from the local CBS All News Radio Channel: 780AM
A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Like so many others, I thought it had to be small plane, that had lost its way.
It literally took the second jet hitting – which anyone who had been watching the coverage of the first hit SAW IN REAL TIME.
THAT is when we realized that we were UNDER ATTACK.
ON AMERICAN SOIL.

@ThoNg676733
🎼🌺Music Love♥️
@ThoNg676733
The 17 Minutes That Changed the History of America and the World

Surely, many people still remember September 11, 2001 — the day images from New York were broadcast around the world and became one of the defining memories of the modern era.

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into floors 93 through 99 of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At the time, many people still had no idea what was really happening. But just 17 minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 struck floors 77 through 85 of the South Tower.

The appearance of the second aircraft completely changed the way people understood what was happening. This was no longer an isolated aviation accident, but a coordinated and deliberate attack. From Brooklyn Heights, cameraman Park Foreman captured one of the most widely recognized images of that day, as the Boeing 767 slammed into the South Tower and a fireball erupted.

After that, events unfolded at a speed few people could have imagined. Just 56 minutes after being struck by the aircraft, the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. At 10:28 a.m., the North Tower collapsed as well.

According to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the collapses were caused by a combination of the aircraft impacts, the dislodging of fireproofing from structural steel members, and large fires spreading across multiple floors. Together, these factors severely weakened the buildings’ structural systems, ultimately leading to their collapse.

In less than two hours, what had once been an iconic part of New York had become a site the world would later come to know as Ground Zero. A total of 2,977 people were killed in the September 11 attacks. At the World Trade Center alone, 343 members of the New York City Fire Department, 23 NYPD officers, and other law-enforcement personnel died while responding to the disaster.

But the attacks did not take place only in New York. At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the western side of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, home to the U.S. Department of Defense. The attack killed 125 people inside the building and all 59 people aboard the aircraft.

Meanwhile, United Airlines Flight 93 was heading toward Washington, D.C. After learning what had happened through phone calls with family members and people on the ground, a group of passengers decided to fight back against the hijackers. Their attempt to regain control of the aircraft ended when Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the aircraft’s intended target may have been the U.S. Capitol or the White House.

After that day, America began to change in ways that perhaps no one could have imagined that morning. In aviation, Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act on November 19, 2001, laying the foundation for the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and establishing a new federal system for screening passengers and baggage.

Those changes extended far beyond airports. On the international stage, the United States launched its war in Afghanistan in 2001 and later expanded its military intervention into Iraq in 2003. The Costs of War project at Brown University has documented the enormous human, financial, and social costs of the post-9/11 wars, as well as consequences that continued long after major military operations officially ended.

Looking back at September 11, 2001, what makes the event such a historic turning point is not only what happened during those few short hours. It is also what changed afterward: how a nation viewed security, how people moved through airports, how the United States exercised military power, and how the world understood the threat of terrorism.

And perhaps that is why, more than two decades later, images from that morning still make people stop and watch. Because sometimes history does not begin with a grand declaration. Sometimes, it can begin with just 17 minutes — the span of time between two aircraft striking two towers, yet enough to change America and open an entirely different chapter in world history.
6:20 PM · Sep 7, 2026
https://x.com/ThoNg676733/status/2097102635375775871

Hadn’t thought about this for a long time.

Barnaby Breaks History 🇺🇸
@BarnabyHistory
🇺🇸 The Boatlift That Was Bigger Than Dunkirk

At 10:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a Coast Guard lieutenant named Mike Day keyed a radio in New York Harbor and said the only sentence that mattered.

“All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, report to Governors Island.”

The boats were already coming.

The bridges were closed. The tunnels were closed. The subways were dead. South of the towers, hundreds of thousands of people had nowhere left to walk. Some jumped into the Hudson. Some stood on seawalls that were never meant to be docks and waited for anything that floated.

Dunkirk took nine days to pull 338,226 Allied soldiers off a beach in 1940.

On 9/11, roughly 800 mariners on about 150 vessels moved as many as 500,000 civilians off Manhattan in about nine hours. Ferries. Tugs. Dinner boats. Pilot boats. Yachts. A retired fireboat. Rubber dinghies that held two people. The largest water evacuation in history.

NY Waterway did not wait for the official call. After the second plane hit, the whole fleet moved. Captain Rick Thornton nosed his ferry against a seawall that was not a slip and started taking people off. Some of them he pulled out of the river. His company alone carried about 158,000 people to Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Brooklyn, and Queens.

On a normal Tuesday they carried 34,000.

The Staten Island Ferry moved more than 50,000 people and came back the other way with water, bandages, and men who still had work to do in the dust.

The old fireboat John J. Harvey, already retired, tied up near the Museum of Jewish Heritage, took civilians off the seawall, then pumped water when the hydrants downtown died.

Lt. Day later admitted what the day required. “I broke more rules that day than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.”

In raw numbers it was bigger than Dunkirk. No boat went down. By nightfall the southern tip of Manhattan had been emptied by people who were not on anyone’s list of heroes when the morning started.

They were tug captains. Ferry deckhands. Pilots. A lieutenant with a microphone. Ordinary boats answering one sentence.

All available boats.
https://x.com/BarnabyHistory/status/2097067384523706398

THIS…all of THIS….

Brain Leakage
@BrainLeakage03
Since you weren’t even born yet, I’m going to answer in good faith:

9/11 was America’s collective loss of innocence. In the decades prior, we’d won the Cold War by outspending the Soviets. We were the sole remaining superpower, and we were in a period of peace and economic prosperity.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we suffered a suicide attack with a higher death toll than Pearl Harbor. It struck a city on the US mainland, the first attack of that scale to hit CONUS since the Civil War.

In a violent flash, and on live television, our collective illusions of safety, security, and peace disappeared. For most Americans, it was the first time we ever had to contend with that scale of horror, and what it implied about the fragility of our way of life.

It was simultaneously sobering and terrifying. The American response was to launch two wars, and to restructure domestic life around the Government’s presumed duty to spy on everyone, so nothing like it could ever happen again.

I am not being hyperbolic when I say the America we grew up in—imagined or not—vanished on 9/11.

What you’re calling a “worshipful attitude” is a mix of reverence for the dead, and mourning for the loss of what existed before.
https://x.com/BrainLeakage03/status/2096961238412468405

All of that.

Archaeo – Histories
@archeohistories
On September 11, 2001, following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) took the unprecedented step of completely grounding all domestic flights and closing American airspace.

With hundreds of international, transoceanic flights already in mid-air and bound for the United States, the Canadian government launched Operation Yellow Ribbon to immediately clear potentially compromised aircraft from U.S. skies.

Transport Canada ordered all incoming traffic that had passed the point of no return over the Atlantic and Pacific to be diverted to Canadian military and civilian airports.

Over the course of the operation, between 225 and 240 aircraft carrying more than 33,000 passengers were safely grounded at 17 different airports across Canada. Smaller east-coast hubs bore the brunt of the emergency landings, including Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the small town of Gander, Newfoundland.

Gander International Airport alone received 38 wide-body planes and over 6,500 stranded passengers and crew, an influx that instantly increased the tiny community’s population by over 60 percent.

As passengers sat stranded for hours on tarmac runways while security screenings were processed, local Canadian communities mobilized extraordinary volunteer efforts. Residents opened their homes, schools, community centers, and places of worship to shelter, feed, and clothe the unexpected guests, whom Newfoundland locals warmly referred to as “Come From Aways.”

For several days, citizens provided free meals, bedding, healthcare, and emotional support until U.S. airspace reopened, a heartwarming display of international solidarity that later inspired books, documentaries, and the hit Broadway musical Come From Away.

Operation Yellow Ribbon involves the quiet logistics of caring for thousands of displaced non-human passengers.

In addition to thousands of human travelers, dozens of diverted flights carried animals in their cargo holds, including 19 dogs, 10 cats, 2 rare Bonobo chimpanzees, and a pair of endangered African monkeys bound for a zoo. In Gander, local SPCA workers and volunteers were refused tarmac access at first due to post-attack security lockdown protocols. Undeterred, they spent days negotiating access, crawling into dark cargo holds to feed, clean, exercise, and care for the distressed animals inside the planes until the grounded aircraft were finally cleared to depart.

#archaeohistories
11:39 PM · Sep 7, 2026
https://x.com/archeohistories/status/2097183068360749115

KC Johnson
@johnson343383
1h
Replying to @one_of_3_Kims and @BookerGWash
I think there’s a streak in all of us especially post 9/11 that if we’re ever on a shall I say, problematic plane, we’re not going to lie down we’re gonna fight. At least I know I would.

Booker G. Washington
@BookerGWash
People said that’s what happened on the 4th plane.

This became the universal public policy for the passagers and crew in the cabin. Beat their asses before they can even touch a door, let alone reach the pilots.
https://x.com/BookerGWash/status/2097388693560394001

kyle
@Caol_MacCormaic
you used to not need a passport to go to Mexico or Canada. the Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not exist in the 20th century. warrantless wiretapping, the GWOT. you better start developing a weird attitude towards 9/11, because you’re living in its world.
https://x.com/Caol_MacCormaic/status/2097295422738104324

Annalea 🪷🐝🌻
@citizengatsby
This 9/11 photo took my breath away. You can see United Flight 175 descending through the smoke from the North Tower. 😲

Found on r/911archive.
https://x.com/citizengatsby/status/2097081508570058936

@David_TJV
Publisher
@David_TJV
RARE 9/11 FOOTAGE NEARLY LOST FOREVER — FOUND 23 YEARS LATER

On September 11, 2001, 24-year-old Japanese man Kei Sugimoto filmed the attack on the World Trade Center from a rooftop about 3 kilometers away.

Twenty-three years later, he rediscovered the deteriorating tapes and published the footage — preserving a visual record that came close to disappearing forever.

#September11 #NeverForget #WorldTradeCenter #911Footage #History
https://x.com/David_TJV/status/2097038432010649880

Marie Moreau’s Blood Connect 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸🇸🇩
@CocoaMochaCrml
I can’t speak to how flippant Gen Z is being about 9/11 but there isnt a way for millennials, especially older ones like myself, to explain what life was before 9/11 nor can I really articulate how there was an understanding that so much about the world was going to change.
5:36 PM · Sep 7, 2026

@CocoaMochaCrml
Marie Moreau’s Blood Connect 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸🇸🇩
@CocoaMochaCrml
21h
Being Black in the US there’s always a undercurrent of your life being perpetually threatened so 9/11 didn’t make me feel any less safe because the delusion of the US being untouchable wasn’t something I subscribed to believing.

@CocoaMochaCrml
Marie Moreau’s Blood Connect 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸🇸🇩
@CocoaMochaCrml
21h
Those towers fell, and I understood that a lot of people had just died, but also that a lot more death was coming. That thought was cemented by one moment on the news: a white man waving the flag and screaming that we needed to bomb them from the face of the earth.

@CocoaMochaCrml
Marie Moreau’s Blood Connect 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸🇸🇩
@CocoaMochaCrml
21h
And once that sentiment was cemented things shifted on a global scale
https://x.com/CocoaMochaCrml/status/2097091699935945012

@WickedBridgie
Bridget
@WickedBridgie
16h
I felt the shift. What is crazy to me my dad said to me a few years before 9/11 that my generation would never have an event as big as Kennedy’s assassination where you would remember what you were doing & wearing well after 9/11 he told me he was sorry we had that event now

Only place that didn’t have it was the Cartoon Network, and maybe HGTV. Every other channel had it.

State of Rach
@Like_AFolkSong
Idk how to tell y’all gen z or whoever it is trying to gaslight millenials and older that we’re making up that we watched graphic news footage of 9/11 all day long in classrooms, in store windows, at home, etc but we most definitely did. On every channel. Every. Channel.
8:51 PM · Sep 7, 2026
https://x.com/Like_AFolkSong/status/2097140685224964141

Levi Fishman
@levifishman
Sep 11, 2023
If you were not old enough to watch the news on 9/11, there is an amazing resource at @internetarchive where you can watch TV news from that day and watch the evolution from “Huh, something hit a WTC building” to “We’re under attack!” archive.org/details/911/da…
9:36 AM · Sep 8, 2026
https://x.com/levifishman/status/2097333304076755013

Booker G. Washington
@BookerGWash
Some folks born after 9/11 hate that folks are talking about it because they can’t pretend older people don’t know anything and didn’t experience anything, for Twitter likes and RTs.

It’s yet another opportunity for them to stfu and learn, if they care to.
10:04 AM · Sep 8, 2026
https://x.com/BookerGWash/status/2097340342643065271