qillermeme: whitepeopletwitter: Those were the days i was too poor for even this..I dont want to b
qillermeme: whitepeopletwitter: Those were the days i was too poor for even this.. I dont want to bring the vibe down on this post, but 1998 kind of was like this for me. 1998, I was a sophomore in high school. The next year, the first person I knew killed themselves. Took a drive into a cornfield with a shotgun, because he’d been bullied to.. let’s say extremes, to be delicate. The year after that, I was a senior when a girl I went to school with finally lost her fight with cancer. Years of suffering, 2 remissions. This was the year of Columbine. I was “removed from the school environment” for 2 months that year after a girl heard me tell a friend that if they were going to tell everyone that the plan was to gather everyone in the gym in case of a bomb threat, wouldn’t that make the gym the most obvious target? The next year was 9/11. Over the course of that and the next year or so, everything I thought I knew, everything I had been taught about how to navigate the world was flipped upside down. I also lost four more of my high school classmates, one of them a close friend who thought he could fly off an overpass after he got addicted to crystal after his gf left him after she got pregnant by someone else. 2 to drunk driving and the last to another suicide. Fast forward a bit and half my graduating class was already gone before ten years went by. A lot of drugs, a lot of suicide. Probably more by now, but I finally stopped checking. Of my old goldeneye group, one became a preacher, which makes sense in retrospect, but he was always an amazing artist and he gave it up. Another joined the navy. He played cello so well I couldn’t tell the difference between him and the philharmonic. Our fourth? I lost track of him completely about 8 years after graduation. He was planning a wedding, and just.. disappeared after that. Life hasn’t been the same since then. Not even in a “good ol days” kind of way, but literally the world was different. I can’t explain it in a way that makes sense to anyone who wasn’t there but.. it still felt like we had a chance. Yeah, Blowjobgate was still going on, and it was funny because no one honestly took it seriously. Gay rights seemed to be growing, slowly but surely. Climate change was still called global warming, but the ozone layer had shrunk! We could make our way out of this! Captain Planet was a mainstream cartoon, and no one called it sjw bullshit. Even Bush v. Gore wasn’t earth shaking because things were going good, no one was even thinking a recession could happen. I know 9/11 is trotted out as a justification for everything and anything these days. “The day that changed America” and all that. But it did. The 90s were a constant Sabre rattling crusade against guns and drugs, the term “super predators” was invented, but people where I’m from still didn’t lock their doors. Kids walked everywhere, our parents literally wouldn’t know where we were and didn’t worry about it. When I was a kid, my brother and I went to a small town hospital and piled up some 22 ammo, soaked them in spray paint and set them on fire so they would overheat and shoot off. ON THE HELICOPTER PAD OF A HOSPITAL, WE FIRED OFF ABOUT 20 ROUNDS. Imagine something like that happening today. And no one even came out to tell us to stop. After 9/11, everything became about terrorism. The US had no idea how to process this, because it had never happened. We were *special*. We were *safe*. And then we weren’t. Everything we just accept as inevitable today has its roots in that day. The militarization of police. The complete destruction of our rights, most noticeably to privacy. The nationalism that currently threatens our democracy. 9/11 made America AFRAID. The terrorists accomplished exactly what they intended to do, and its been going amazingly. With a handful of guys, they started the destabilizing of America. In a hundred years, if there are any historians, they will pinpoint 9/11 as the first domino in the chain. The government lost their collective shit and overstepped every single boundary we had and we *begged* them to go further. They didn’t even have to hide anything when they did it, just slap America or Homeland Security in the title and people would complain that it didn’t go far enough. We gave up everything for imagined safety from a threat that didn’t really exist. Al Queda blew everything they had on that attack, they didnt have the men or the money or ANYTHING to attack again. Every email or text you send, every phone call, every interaction with a machine, is now recorded and analyzed. No warrant necessary. Because you’ve decided to interact with the world outside your bedroom, you’ve forfeited any right to privacy you may have had. You will submit to a strip search if asked before you can fly. A cop can do literally anything to you in any context and he starts with an absolute presumption of innocence, then immunity from any liability, and finally a court system that has said now that federal agents can’t be sued for any reason. It’s gotten so bad, so much worse than it used to be, but there was a big bright line in 2001 where you can point to the average person before then and they would be bewildered by what our daily life is like today. 1998, a pizza, and 4 friends playing Goldeneye, was the last time in my life that anything made sense. My friend with the n64 always wanted to play Golden Gun on Temple. We would stay up late, and when I went to school the next day, I wouldn’t be worried about anything, except what I was gonna say to the cute redhead I sat next to in lit. -- source link