None of My Students Remember 9/11 (2021) | Hacker News Reader

None of My Students Remember 9/11 (2021)

theatlantic.com

21 pointsfortran7724 comments

> On 9/11, the president and his advisers were hustled onto Air Force One and into underground emergency bunkers

Um, no, that's not what happened. Apparently the teacher doesn't remember either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pet_Goat

>According to Bill Sammon's book Fighting Back, Bush's gaze flitted about the room—the children, the press, the floor, his staff—while his mind raced about everything he did not yet know.

It seems quite un-presidential to think "Let me just sit here for another 10 minutes with these kids so they don't panic."... He (with 22 years of hindsight) could've just said "I'm sorry kids, something's come up that need my attention, so I'm going to have to go now.". Of course he didn't have any power to actually alter anything at that very moment (the attacks were basically done), but it was during such a fog of war that he/his team wouldn't have known yet that they were powerless...

The President was put onto Air Force One: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/were-the-onl...

From there, he was taken to STRATCOM, which was in an underground bunker: https://www.ketv.com/article/tracing-president-bushs-path-at...

He was with the kids when it happened. THEN they hustled him into the plane, and took him to a bunker.

> He was with the kids when it happened. THEN they hustled him into the plane

"After being discreetly informed of the September 11 attacks midway through the reading, Bush waited quietly for the reading to finish before dealing with the unfolding crisis."

"Afterwards, the children continued to read and President Bush sat while"

"the notoriously punctual president lingered in the classroom after the reading exercise was finished"

"After chatting with the students and their teacher, Bush deflected a Trade Center–related question from a reporter"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pet_Goat

Does any of that sound like hustle to you?

Watch the actual video recording of the classroom in Michael Moore's documentary. There is was no hustle whatsoever. It's quite excruciating to see.

With all due disrespect to GWB, what was he going to do with those few minutes?

I was watching the real-time 9/11 site earlier today. GWB made a television statement 30 minutes after the first tower was hit. That’s the kind of response time I would expect from a president in today’s hyperconnected society - it was really impressive.

When I hear about people criticizing his decision to stay in the classroom for a few more minutes, all I can think is… “who cares?”

> GWB made a television statement 30 minutes after the first tower was hit.

This is also wrong. He made a statement, from the elementary school, 45 minutes after the first tower was hit, and this again contradicts the false claim that "the president and his advisers were hustled onto Air Force One".

There are 2 ridiculous things happening here:

1) Someone who literally teaches the history of 9/11 and is complaining that students don't remember gets the facts wrong.

2) Multiple commenters here on HN are for some reason defending the false claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_for_the_day_of_the_Se...

8:46:40: Flight 11 crashes into the north face of the North Tower (1 WTC) of the World Trade Center

8:55: President George W. Bush arrives at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, as part of a scheduled visit to promote education and is reading The Pet Goat when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who is with Bush, informs him that a small twin-engine plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. Before entering the classroom, the President speaks to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who is at the White House.

9:29: President Bush makes his first public statements about the attacks, in front of an audience of about 200 teachers and students at the elementary school.

I was on IRC at the time, on Undernet. It was in the wee hours of the morning here. Some dude came into the channel and said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre. I said something like "Dude, it's too low for a plane to hit it, with all those tall buildings around it", because I thought he was talking about the World Trade Centre in Melbourne AU. He clarified that he meant the one in NYC. So along with everyone else, I jumped into a hastily created temp channel dedicated to news of the event, which was filling with people faster than I'd ever seen before. Updates were scrolling up the screen super fast. I was living with my parents and siblings at the time, and I ran around and told everyone to get up, and turned on the old CRT television which weighed about 600 tons. So we all sat there watching, and then the second plane hit the other tower. It felt like it was some Hollywood BS, not a real thing. We watched people jump out and fall. It was quite difficult to believe it was even happening.

Not super relevant, but at the time, they said they had scrambled F16s and one had shot down the plane over the field in Pennsylvania to prevent another attack. Either their initial reports were wrong, or they changed the story later to create some heroes.

The first reports were bogus. I remember the first articles I read back then were saying a Cessna had hit one tower, and it sounded like a weird accident. Later, articles about the second plane came in and it was still not clear that they were big airliners. Then things got busy because I was working in web hosting and we had one or two major French newspapers web sites in our datacenter, and they couldn't handle the load.

> Not super relevant, but at the time, they said they had scrambled F16s and one had shot down the plane over the field in Pennsylvania to prevent another attack. Either their initial reports were wrong, or they changed the story later to create some heroes.

https://youtu.be/69uSD1S14RI

This YouTube channel is great by the way.

The first wave was a couple of F-15s three F-16s. That flight 93 was shot down by a South Dakota Air National Guard F-16 pilot is false. It's a coincidence that the pilot was heading west of the first attacks to pick up an FAA official to assist with the investigation in New York.

All the fighters at the time were either still on the ground or in a holding pattern off the east coast. The FAA was slow enough to relay details that every launch was already too late to respond to their target.

I watched the whole thing live. I clearly remember a passenger plane being followed by a couple of fighters. It was filmed by a civilian on the ground. After some time, there was the news about a passenger plane that crashed somewhere.

I couldn't find that footage anymore.

How old are your students? Late bloomers at college? Otherwise it is hardly a surprise that school students who were not born yet do not remember it. Does the author remember the Munich Olympics? The moon landing? The invasion of Poland? Archduke Ferdinand being assassinated?

[EDIT] Oh I see she teaches at a college about it. No wonder she's so appalled at the thought it is rapidly becoming history.

In this article: Someone is surprised that time happens.

Some of the classrooms in my high school had TV/VCR mounted in the corner from the ceiling. Used for the odd VHS, usually by a sub. As such, no one dreamed they had cable—we learned on 9/11 they did. I guess the teachers were willing to let that secret out—so we could all watch the news.

> None of My Students Remember 9/11 (2021)

And that's a good thing. Just look at the comments, propaganda works as intended. /s

https://archive.ph/r156l

She may have a better time finding students who are more emotionally connected at a school other than Stanford.

There's also the fact that this was written 20 years after the event, and most college students are around the ages of 18-25. You can't remember an event you were born after, and most people don't remember much that happened before they were about 5. If you were 5 or less when it happened, you may not have even known that it happened for some time, depending on where you lived, how your parents handled it, and if you were in a daycare/school setting, what you got from others there.

(2021)

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