Mister Speaker posted:

I was just starting 9th grade when 9/11 happened. Before that, I had zero understanding of politics outside of Canada, especially what went on in the Middle East. Up until grade 7 all I knew about politics ended provincially; I knew from my parents and my friends' parents that Mike Harris was a bad man and the Toronto amalgamation ("MEGACITY") was a bad idea. I had read some stuff in my Dad's Adbusters magazines about the Gulf War but it was still very confusing to me, and I had one Jewish friend who would never shut the gently caress up about Israel or his anti-semitic persecution complex. I went to a particularly liberal school for grades 7/8, and I definitely remember being encouraged to think critically but it was also mostly local politics - in retrospect, global politics were probably too hot-button for thirteen year-olds due to the diversity of our class - and the aforementioned Jewish kid with a persecution complex. I flew on exactly one plane to Europe with my Dad - I think I was 11 - and remember it being a totally awesome experience with zero 'scary security moments' beyond maybe one guy with an MP5 at a Dutch airport. I remember shouting "we're all gonna die!" when the plane took off and my Dad told me to shut up, and then like an hour later the pilots gave me a tour of the cockpit. Life was pretty relaxed.

On 9/11 I was in homeroom when our teacher told us something very controversial had happened Stateside, and asked if we knew anything about it already. Some teacher's pet stuck up her hand and said something about a "sewage problem" she had likely watched on CBC the night before. The teacher shook her head, and explained it in vague detail. In a few minutes we were watching the footage on a TV cart that our librarian wheeled in. I remember he was crying. The principal made an announcement that we would all have the rest of the day off. My buddies and I met out front of the school and probably made some dumb racist jokes, or wildly speculated in jest about what was next - "like we're in some kind of danger in Toronto, haha no way man I'm 15 OK see you guys tomorrow" then we took the subway home. My Mom was glued to the TV for the rest of the day.

I guess the weirdest thing about it was how it turned a lot of us onto politics - it turned us into conservative reactionaries. I was a teenage libertarian, at an arts' school, and that didn't really change until halfway through college. A few of us developed interests in firearms, a smaller few became armchair generals obsessed with the military-industrial complex. Some of us said some pretty racist, very regrettable poo poo. Jewish buddy went from star saxophone player in the school's touring band to enrolling in the US Marines right out of 12th grade - he got shot in the chest in Fallujah and now teaches cops how to cope with PTSD (lol). My best friend in the whole world is still a bit hawkish with some dumb conservative opinions; more recently he and I have gotten into shouting matches about Israel/Palestine, the Collateral Murder video, the G20 conference, etc. but we still see eye-to-eye on things occasionally. The way I see it, it kind of stupefied my immediate generation, some for longer than others. But otherwise we still had a relatively normal high school experience - drinking in parks, shooting Roman Candles at one another, ordering beer from dial-a-bottle and having a buddy's hot girlfriend answer the door so we wouldn't get ID'd, smoking weed in a ravine and renting movies from Blockbuster and eating pizza until 4AM.