Looking stuff up about the late 90s in the US for a ttrpg and realising again that like a third of that country lost their fucking minds after 9/11 on the same kind of level as the red scare
sometimes i don't think people who started to grow up here after the 90s quite realize just how stark a difference there is pre- and post-9/11
at least certainly in north america, but the effects have absolutely rippled outward
like just on the surface, you could get on a plane without being body scanned and felt up - there was still some screening but literally the TSA did not exist, the US DHS did not exist as an entity. "but TERRORISM!" was... okay it was still sort of a thing but way more abstract and not used to justify atrocities on the daily
the 80s and 90s were far from perfect and certainly plagued by their own problems i don't want to minimize. but i suspect for a lot of us millennials, watching how we reacted to 9/11 and how our culture changed as a result represents a singular point where hope that a better world was possible died
the saying goes, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," but living through the before and after, it feels like this is... a crack, where, if the metaphorical arc truly had a hopeful bend to it, it was snapped, broken, and dragged into the pits of what would become the seed of rising hatred, intolerance, and a bend toward global conservatism and fascism (ah, but i repeat myself)
again, not to trivialize the unique problems we had in the 80s and 90s1, but sometimes i wonder what the experience of being a 2000s baby is like, never knowing what a pre-9/11 world looked like
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i cannot stress enough that there's some real bad shit in there and i dont have to tell most of you about that
I was an incredibly insular nerd outside the US during that period with no interest or knowledge of politics and let me tell you even then the flood of not just browser games and clickbait ads but actual published games with incredibly crass focus on killing terrorists who were just middle eastern stereotypes around 2002/3 felt fucking bewildering
