>>339620>People really were that willfully ignorant back then?1. A lot of them were, yes lol
2. There are several things that people mean when they talk about 9/11 as a perspective-changing event:
Firstly, at the time, a lot of these folks hadn't seen the US (let alone civilians) attacked from outside at this scale. 9/11 killed
a lot of people in famous towers in the country's biggest city. America had had
tons of terrorist activity actually, but events were usually much smaller in terms of death counts. This was the sort of death toll and destruction usually associated with, like, military attacks and stuff - IE the kind of loss the US had bestowed upon foreign countries, but not vice versa. A lot of Americans were genuinely patriotic idiots or
became patriotic idiots following the attack.
On the other hand, there was immediately an insane response to the attacks. The irrational fury was used by the Bush administration to justify unprecedented levels of mass surveillance, and two pointless invasive wars. What you could say or do was monitored way more than in the past, any skepticism of the Bush admin was shut down, everyone was treated as a potential terrorist and open racism against Arabs and religious bigotry against Muslims was rampant. This was of major significance to anyone who had been alive prior and saw through it - and even a lot of the people who
didn't see through it eventually came around and realized they'd been fucking duped.
It doesn't compare to like the oil crisis lol… like come on. 9/11 and its aftermath are more comparable to Vietnam + Pearl Harbor + Watergate if Nixon had gotten away with it and done way worse things. Like you roll those all into one, and that's what 9/11 America was like.