Ruben Bolling's comic strip from 12th Sept 2001
Ruben Bolling's comic strip from 12th Sept 2001
Attached: 1 image Here is that first comic I did after the attacks. I had a job in the World Financial Center and had to escape the financial district on that day. It's hard to convey my emotions as I reluctantly and resentfully cast about for comic ideas and came up with this.
It sort of reads like a surrealist antijoke through modern eyes.
The way I read the comic was that the attacks sucked everything else out of the public consciousness. Which was true for months.
North Americans felt like they were in uncharted territory - we went from "We won the Cold War! It's the End Of History!" to feeling threatened in the course of a few hours.
(I'm saying this as a Canadian, so maybe I don't have it quite right)
the attacks sucked everything else...
That makes sense from a retrospective view but I think that wasn't as apparent the day after the terrorist attack itself.
It was apparent.
I worked in Ottawa, Canada. I had to walk the last few blocks to work that morning because my bus driver stopped to listen to the radio. The driver played it loud so the passengers could hear. At work, I was in a crunch to get stuff done for a conference in October or November, but it was cancelled on that day, so I took the afternoon off.
TV and radio channels were exclusively talking about the attacks, the rescue/recovery efforts in New York, and reactions from around the world. I mean exclusively. Literally nothing else was getting coverage.
News websites were unresponsive because so many people were checking them. I'm not talking about CNN and US sites, I'm talking about the CBC, BBC, and Globe and Mail.
I'm pretty sure there were flyovers by military craft, but I remember the skies being otherwise empty. Ottawa didn't get a tonne of air traffic, but it was noticeable.
The attacks sucked everything out of the public consciousness. Even in other countries, TV, radio, and online coverage switched to the attacks immediately. People changed their daily activities because of it.
I was in 3rd grade when 9/11 occurred. I grew up never having memory of a time that our country wasn't at war.
Yeah, 9/11 was a tragedy, but so is the hundreds of thousands of civilians that were killed overseas due to the war. Every year it gets harder and harder to care about this. Why does this senseless violence get commemorated every year with banquets and memorials worth millions of dollars while so much other senseless violence gets ignored?
Is it really ethically okay to spend so much money and time on one incident? Why do we give this one tragedy that occurred over 20 years ago so much attention when there are people who need help today?
Sorry to rant, but I cant help the feeling that our priorities are fucked up.
Also, as an outsider, the USA feels like one of those people who sort of brags so much that you don't want to give them sympathy when they're genuinely wronged, which now I write it is very callous to say but I could imagine it's a common feeling.
Terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, killing thousands.