I quit my first real job on 9/11. I watched the buildings go down, walked into the deli I hated working at and said, “life is too short.” Which for an 18 year old me was a pretty big move.
I had a job in Colorado at a small 20-30 person company, including two devout muslim immigrant men from Afghanistan. OMG, they were freaking the fuck out, thinking people were going to come drag them out of the office and murder them in the parking lot. Everybody had their back and tried to calm them down, but boy, they were so stressed out.
Americans went nuts after 9/11. It was weird how all of a sudden, it was ok to be openly racist. Up to then, I knew older people were racist, but were being shamed into keeping quiet and it was fading from younger generations, but 9/11 set all that back. They were right to be scared.
Had a French teacher in high school who was from Morocco, and Muslim. He had some pretty harrowing stories from the years following 9/11. Said the harassment started immediately that day, before he had even seen the news.
The most extreme of them involved him and his family being targeted at home with a drive-by shooting. Said some of the rounds missed his daughter by inches right where she was sleeping.
There were several different attacks, and attempted attacks, which varied in the level of violence, but all were random acts of opportunity during otherwise hum-drum quotidien activities, like grocery shopping and pumping gas. Literal IRL terrorism, but the perpetrators were always white so… y’know.
He recounted the feeling of being hunted as urban prey by bat-guano crazy rednecks…chilling.
That vibe quieted down by the 2010s, but now it’s come roaring back. MAGA is like three 9/11s in a trench coat.
I quit my first real job on 9/11. I watched the buildings go down, walked into the deli I hated working at and said, “life is too short.” Which for an 18 year old me was a pretty big move.
I had a job in Colorado at a small 20-30 person company, including two devout muslim immigrant men from Afghanistan. OMG, they were freaking the fuck out, thinking people were going to come drag them out of the office and murder them in the parking lot. Everybody had their back and tried to calm them down, but boy, they were so stressed out.
Americans went nuts after 9/11. It was weird how all of a sudden, it was ok to be openly racist. Up to then, I knew older people were racist, but were being shamed into keeping quiet and it was fading from younger generations, but 9/11 set all that back. They were right to be scared.
Had a French teacher in high school who was from Morocco, and Muslim. He had some pretty harrowing stories from the years following 9/11. Said the harassment started immediately that day, before he had even seen the news.
The most extreme of them involved him and his family being targeted at home with a drive-by shooting. Said some of the rounds missed his daughter by inches right where she was sleeping.
There were several different attacks, and attempted attacks, which varied in the level of violence, but all were random acts of opportunity during otherwise hum-drum quotidien activities, like grocery shopping and pumping gas. Literal IRL terrorism, but the perpetrators were always white so… y’know.
He recounted the feeling of being hunted as urban prey by bat-guano crazy rednecks…chilling.
That vibe quieted down by the 2010s, but now it’s come roaring back. MAGA is like three 9/11s in a trench coat.
I mean, if they were in Texas they probably have a reason to worry
they still had cause to worry in Colorado. people were fucking crazy