Was dealing with kids watching The Challenger disaster the same as kids watching 9/11?

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JessMasuga49@reddit

I can only speak to my experience as a kid then and an adult later. I was 12 when Challenger happened and 27 when 9/11 did. That said, I think both tragedies could have been very impactful on kids depending on how much exposure they had -- time watching it live and theb watching it later, if they knew people who were close to either event or proximity to it, and how much kids may have been sheltered from it. I watched Challenger happen live and it was the moment I realized bad things happen (I know, I was naive). I was crushed thinking about all those people dying and their families' loss. I can't remember if Baby Jessica falling in the well happened before pr after that? While it had a happy ending, I remember having that feeling again: that life can suddenly turn dark and tragic. I lived in NYC from 1996-2005 (with 9 months somewhere in there in Boston). I worked in Midtown. My Dad worked near Penn Station. He saw one of the planes pass closely by his office building and he wasn't on a high floor. I watched it happen on TV. At first, we thought the second plane striking was a replay of the first plane hitting. When we saw the two holes and heard the newscast, we realized we were watching it unfold in real time. We didn't know whether to stay put or head home. City officials stopped the subways and then restarted them later to get people home. When I walked outside, from Midtown, you could see and smell the smoke and ash. People who had fleed that area walked by us covered in ash. We didn't know what to think. And like everyone else, we couldn't call anyone. Kids whose friends and family boarded planes or just went to work were suddenly gone. And even the kids who weren't directly impacted may have thought about thr kids who lost lived ones. That day and later, fighter jets hovered in our air space. Military members with machine guns guarded our subways and elsewhere. We heard reports about threats in the subway or certain areas of the city, so sometimes you wondered if you should walk to work, skip it, etc. While the towers were attacked before and people perished, 9/11 was an act of terrorism on our soil that led to many more deaths, so many major events and shit. Plus, the anthrax attacks quickly followed on Sept 18 - Oct 12. Kids and Challenger: It was a tragedy, but unless the kids were on site, it was possible to compartmentalize. 9/11 was a tragedy that changed us. Sorry for the long post, but I appreciate the chance to share.

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6eyedwonder@reddit

It's a meme, so it isn't strictly true, but it does have a kernel of truth. Challenger was a formative event for many American Gen Xers culturally because, for many of us, it is the first concrete disaster that we witnessed and remember. It is also unique because it was one of the first disasters that was broadcast and witnessed in real time: we were tuned in to see a space shuttle with a teacher on board launch. For many of us, we were watching because a teacher was on board - we weren't tuned in knowing that we were witnessing tragedy (such as already watching the news about the first tower when the second tower was hit.) It is also true that most of our adults had no idea how to deal with trauma and we didn't have resources to help us process what we saw. What was there to talk about? We didn't talk about trauma. We were dependent on the news (paper, tv, radio) if we wanted to find out more about Challenger: there was no internet.) The shuttle program was stopped for a few years and that was it. Others have commented that Challenger was not a big deal because we just went on like nothing happened: that's the same thing as not recognizing and processing trauma. I don't think Challenger can be understood without discussing the space race. We grew up in a time where the United States was understood to be the world leader in science and in space, specifically. Challenger was a big crack in the idea that the US could do anything we set our minds to and that we were world-dominant. Many of us were probably already in the process of understanding how completely false the narrative about we could do anything we wanted to do, or that the USA was some kind of shining beacon of possibility or naturally better at anything and everything, but Challenger was a moment of gross understanding that we are not invincible collectively. Most of us (especially if we think of Gen X as 1965 - 1981 and '61 - '65 as the micro generation Gen Jones,) didn't know enough history to understand the Vietnam War and how that impacted the myth of American Excellence. I watched Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, but I sure as heck did not fully understand them in '86 - '88. I think of Challenger as one of the items in our Gen X bucket of impending doom: nuclear war, natural disaster, accidents like Challenger, AIDS. One of my reactions to 9/11 was "oh, shit, it finally happened," not "how could it happen to us?" I'm sure growing up near Washington, D.C. with lots of military and government workers in my community and being a little more tuned in to geopolitical stuff played a role in that.

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JessMasuga49@reddit

Very well aaid.

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Amadeo78@reddit

Well said. Challenger is also a weird instance of preparing kids (for over a year) to see something cool and instead showing unexpected live death in an official and normally safe setting.

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EvenSpoonier@reddit

I swear I remember watching this from home, not school, and I don't remember anyrbing happenong st school (thoigh we had, of course, heard about it in the weeks leading up to it). I think this must have been when I had chicken pox: I don't remember the exact dates but it *was* around that time. Anything they might have done at school was already finished when I got back. People just didn't talk about it much after that. I don't remember having a huge emotional impact from 9/11 either, but even I know that trying to compare 9/11 to the Challenger disaster is breathtakingly crass. They're not even the same league. GenX just doesn't have a single big event like that. There are not a whole lot of ways in which our childhoods could really be called lucky, but this is one.

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someone_like_me@reddit

> I recently saw a video explaining that Gen-X is the way they are because they got homework and no hugs after witnessing the Challenger disaster on TV. So much bullshit chasing clicks. Gen-X were hardcore steeped in irony and sarcasm. We were telling jokes about that shit before the sun set. "You hear who NASA just recruited for the next flight? A substitute teacher." Reagan was shot when I was in the 8th grade. We all cheered when we heard. Even the kids whose families voted him in. We were just happy somebody got shot. The teachers gave us a special talk, that it was wrong to cheer when a president got shot. None of us saw the point of that talk.

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CygnusX1@reddit

The only thing I remember about the Challenger disaster was my teacher coming into the classroom to tell us about it. It was shocking but nothing that stuck around. 9/11 was one of the worst days of my life. I had butterflies in my stomach for two weeks and a low-key sense of dread for a couple years after. I had to ask that a forwards-from-grandma-style note posted on a wall at work be taken down that talked about how the yellow hordes we fought in WWII were on the rise again, but this time it was Muslims. An administrator at work changed his last name from a Muslim sounding name to a Greek one (he was from Cyprus) because his kids were getting picked on at school. I actually emailed George Bush imploring restraint in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq which is remarkably naive to think about now. I thought for sure WWIII was right around the corner. I saw my friends go off to war, letters with anthrax were making the rounds, and the DC sniper started picking people off near where I lived. Someone I knew online at the time lost their mother in that airplane crash in Queens that came soon after 9/11. I consider the early days of this century as a very dark time in my life.

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ssk7882@reddit

I've been thinking about this, and I really do feel as if much of the discourse about the Challenger disaster and GenX is...just another example of us living in the shadow of the Boomers (and later, perhaps even in the double-shadow of the Boomers and the Millennials!). The Boomers had the Kennedy assassination, so surely GenX must have had its own Big Touchstone Moment like that one, some discrete event for which everyone remembers where they were when they heard about it. Right? And then the Millennials...well, holy shit, they had 9/11! That's another Kennedy Assassination or Pearl Harbor type event, one which everyone remembers so vividly. But that one belongs to the Millennials, surely, so what's the one GenX has? GenX just *has* to have had some equivalent touchstone, right? Right? Well, nope. We didn't. Sorry. We had a lot of little things: the airing of *The Day After* on network television, Ronald Reagan saying that "the bombing will begin in five minutes," and a host of smaller events that taken together created the overwhelming atmosphere of pervasive dread about nuclear war under which we operated. We had events like the assassination of John Lennon, the Reagan landslide elections, the failure of the ERA, and Tipper Gore facing down Dee Snider -- all of which taken together drove home with *ruthless* brutality the notion that the Moral Majority had ascended triumphant, and that the dreams of the hippies had been taken out back, shot in the head, and buried in an unmarked grave. There were a lot of little singular events you can point to as smaller touchstones that helped to establish our generational zeitgeist. But there wasn't any one giant memorable event that works for us the same way that the Kennedy Assassination did for the Baby Boomers. It just doesn't exist.

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ssk7882@reddit

The Challenger disaster is one of those events that probably felt far more significant to younger GenXers than to older ones. I was in college when the Challenger exploded. While I guess it was rather sad, it wasn't a terribly traumatic or even particularly memorable event from my perspective, and I was genuinely surprised when I first heard that it was considered a GenX cultural touchstone. 9/11, on the other hand, was something that even adults were really shook by.

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Pirlovienne@reddit

I also was in college during Challenger and had a similar reaction. 9/11 on the other hand was immediate for me. I was working near the White House and from my boss’s window I could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon. It felt like a near miss to me. Casualties went to the hospital in my neighborhood. I could SEE the gaping hole in the Pentagon on the way home that day. For weeks afterward, there were patrols of black SUVs, doors open, long guns showing. Practically overnight, we went from pretty much open government buildings (just show your badge) to security screenings everywhere. And we all had to reckon with the knowledge that we were vulnerable because of where we lived and worked. Can I just offer an observation as a tangent? That famous photo of GWB reading to schoolchildren with Andrew Card whispering the news into his ear? It’s often held out as evidence that GWB was in over his head. I’m no fan of his, but I don’t see how any president, in that moment, would be anything other than completely shocked, which is what his reaction betrays to me. Criticize the man for the War on Terror that followed if you like, but give him a break for that moment.

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ssk7882@reddit

Yes! I was, believe me, no fan of W., but I've always had the exact same reaction to that footage. The man was receiving shocking and terrible news that he knew it was going to be up to him and his administration to deal with and furthermore, he was receiving it in front of an attentive audience of very young children. How precisely did people *want* him to react? Honestly, it's about the most sympathetic I've ever found the man.

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exscapegoat@reddit

Older x as well. I was in class and working that day. I was a sophomore and living in the dorms. I didn’t have access to cable tv and we didn’t have the internet. There was no tv at work. I heard on my way to lunch at the dining hall. But i didn’t see tv footage until I watched the news after work. We had the radio on at work.

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Engchik79@reddit

Was in third grade when we saw it explode and it was awful. However watching those buildings come down on tv in a city I visited regularly in real time as a 24 year old adult was horrifying and traumatic and something I will never ever forget.

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GalaxyRedRanger@reddit

I was in 3rd grade when it happened and I don’t remember any kids feeling anything. It was just one more thing that happened on the news.

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BlueSnaggleTooth359@reddit

I was in high school and Challenger did hit pretty hard. It's mentioned as a key event in all the high school year books from the time that I've seen. It was announced to the entire school as soon as it happened.

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hesathomes@reddit

I was also in college. Never watched another shuttle launch. That was the only impact tbh. 9/11 was entirely different.

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QueenShewolf@reddit (OP)

That's true. My mom came home on her lunch break to take me to my grandparents' house. It was years later that she said the reason she did that was because she didn't want me to be alone because she thought the world was going to explode. Also, I'm from Long Island, meaning NYC is like my backyard. My mom thought terrorists could attack us next.

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cawfytawk@reddit

Not at all. Challenger wasn't intentional or mass murder.

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Boshie2000@reddit

I watched that in class in 7th grade and it was awful. But I watched the towers from my window and it completely changed the entire city in ways that you would never have expected. Armed guards at the subway stations and everyone knew someone that died or was profoundly affected by it. And I developed asthma after, which I never had. And moved my entire life to LA six months later.

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QueenShewolf@reddit (OP)

Holy fuck, dude. My mom’s coworker’s husband was a CF employee. I remember going to her house to offer my condolences with my mom.

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Boshie2000@reddit

Yeah my neighbor’s devastated girlfriend was on a ton of anti depressants and moved back to the Midwest shortly after and gave me their pup. I did get a best friend out of it for over 15 years. Best dog I ever had hands down.

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Sweet_Priority_819@reddit

totally different. I was 7, almost 8 when the Challenger disaster happened. It was probably being shown in real time in the classroom since I was on the east coast. I don't even remember it, so it must not have been traumatic. It would have been on a small screen up in the corner of the ceiling, I can't imagine I was even able to perceive it as real at that age. It was also an accident that killed a few people not a terrorist attack that killed thousands. For 9/11 I was 22 and working 10 blocks away from WTC. Super different experience that I remember as if it was only a few months ago.

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LipBalmOnWateryClay@reddit

Very different incidents. The thing about the Challenger event was it was billed as a big educational event with Christa McAuliffe. Literally every school in the country rolled out the cart with the TV and gathered the students to watch live. With 9/11 a whole generation lost their innocence and the world changed to a much more frightening reality.

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Serenity-V@reddit

My third grade class watched the Challenger explosion. Excitement. Explosion. A room full of crying children. Yeah, it marked us - the launch had been publicized in elementary schools across the country for weeks because of the teacher-astronaut. We were somewhat traumatized, and we all remember it. But it was a bad thing that happened, and then it was over. I was student-teaching on September 11. Most of the kids didn't come to school that day. The ones who did were terrified and asking if our school was going to be bombed. We sent them all home because our city went into lock-down. When the school reopened, we found that all our kids' parents had let them sit in front of cable news *all day* for days. I watched CNN as well - i t was a near-constant loop of the same footage over, over, over again, interspersed with apocalyptic news coverage. The kids' trauma was immense. And the younger kids - K-2 grades - did not understand they'd seen the same few minutes' footage over and over. They thought they'd seen many, many buildings across the U.S. destroyed by many, many airplanes. They thought we were being invaded. They were afraid that they were going to die. It was at least as traumatizing, for them, as The Day After had been for children too young to know that it was fiction when it was broadcast; but where that had been a single evening never to be repeated and without further reinforcement, this was real, and was reinforced constantly for weeks. It was much, much worse than the Challenger.

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lillienoir@reddit

As others have said, these are two very different experiences. Challenger really was a tragic accident. When seeing the footage of it immediately after it happened, one could hear a pin drop as if none of us could believe what we just saw, until some started crying. In the days that followed, we were grief-stricken, & it was expected & understood some of us would be tearful about it. It was one of my first experiences understanding hubris & the realization that important institutions could make serious mistakes & underestimations. Even in western Canada, 9/11 was a horrendous, terrifying, & life-altering event in so many ways. As it was announced on the news, I needed to pick my kid up from kindergarten. Everyone I saw had a lingering look of shock on their faces; we could barely talk to each other. We were numb with horror. For weeks afterward I couldn't look at a plane flying over my city without getting into some kind of panicky fear. Even today, if I watch footage of the towers, I feel so sick in my heart & I will cry, no matter how I was feeling prior to seeing it. It's haunting & just terrible beyond words. I felt that the world changed forever on that day.

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koine2004@reddit

I was in 5th grade. An assistant principal of the school came into the room, whispered something into the teacher's ear, and brought in that glorious A/V cart along with our companion class (same teachers, different part of the day). We were told we were going to watch sad news about the Challenger. We then watched in horror the news coverage. The school day was effectively over and homework was cancelled in solidarity with the death of the who was supposed to be the first teacher in space. We were invited to talk about it and counselors were available. We had a class discussion about what we were feeling. It was business as usual the next day. Also, while the Challenger disaster was very sad and tragic, it wasn't world altering like 9/11. 9/11 was more akin to the Kennedy assassination (at least that's how mom describes her thoughts). We are the way we are, in general, because we were the first generations to experience broken homes en masse as children, and we had to spend a lot of time on our own. We were also told to just suck it up and ignore the pain and confusion. That messes an adult up much less a kid. I'm a chaplain for first responders (mostly fire/rescue and EMS), I see first hand the damage that "just suck it up and tell yourself you're fine" does to someone. I myself, like many of those my age, were convinced (I started thinking this when I was about 9) we wouldn't live past 30 because the world would go up in a nuclear holocaust before then. My parents told me, when I shared my fears, you're alive now so just don't think about it. Thus, we developed a huge cynical streak--especially those of us born in the 70's.

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Infamous-Associate65@reddit

I was a high school junior when the Space Shuttle exploded & it was sad & all, but nobody I knew felt traumatized. For 9.11, I was working as a high school guidance counselor & a few kids were freaking out that multiple attacks were imminent on their parents' workplaces & even our school, big difference between reactions.

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CyndiIsOnReddit@reddit

I skipped school the day of the Challenger disaster and I remember being alone watching it at my grands' house. I was shocked but I don't know... I was just like "oh my god that's terrible" and after a few minutes I was just annoyed because I couldn't watch my soaps. We talked about it like how we now talk about things that happen in foreign countries we're not too familiar with. It was a sad thing but nobody dwelled on it too much. It was just on the news a lot for a couple of days, mostly focused on the teacher's death. I can't even compare it to 9/11 it was completely different. We thought we might be at the start of something very big, like for days we were waiting for another attack. We talked about it for months. The entire nation grieved. I don't remember people not talking about it after two days. We talked about it for months here. We saw the retaliatory acts even right next door to our complex, someone vandalized and tried to set fire to the convenience store because the owners were "middle eastern". They ended up having a cross and flag painted on the side of the building and before they had that finished they kept a handwritten note on their door to let people know WE ARE CHRISTIAN! I don't know if they were Christian, but I was sad that they had to deal with this. I think within the same period someone also set their car on fire but I don't know if it was related because someone set fire to my van in the same lot that year. Just another day in Memphis.

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bigSTUdazz@reddit

Ummmm...no. 7 astronauts that knew the risks being strapped to a big explosive device to reach escape velocity vs. 3000 people just showing up to work one day being slaughtered....big diff homie.

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GeneralDumbtomics@reddit

I mean this happened, yes, but it’s not a lot of oyster out of which to try and make that much soup. I think it goes a little bit more like this: Gen X saw the Lennon assassibation, the Reagan assassination, the challenger disaster, David Lee Roth, Automan, the list could go on for days and not begin to encompass the trauma inflicted on us by media. When you add how many of us had the other sorts of abuse to contend with as well, and didn’t get any more support about that than we did anything else, it seems bizarre that any of us are here.

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KatJen76@reddit

I like how your list included David Lee Roth and Battle of the Network Stars. Sometimes I close my eyes and I still see Adrienne Barbeau pulling on that tug-of-war rope. I wake in the night and turn on some classical music to rest, but I can't drown out "Just A Gigolo" playing on repeat in my head...

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PMMEBITCOINPLZ@reddit

Challenger was an accident. 9/11 was an attack on the country. People, especially kids, had no way of knowing there would not be more attacks. So of course there was a lot more anxiety there.

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KatJen76@reddit

Most people I knew were braced for another attack for months, even years. Even daily life, I started to view it differently. I noticed how anyone could just walk into my workplace, how easy it would be for anyone to drive a bomb truck right into my store. I know it wasn't just me. I had a temp job working a booth at a fair for a business when the 2003 blackout happened on the East Coast. Lots of the other exhibitors thought it was a terrorist attack. And earlier that year, just before the war, a horrible stampede ar a Chicago nightclub killed like 20 people. Someone had used pepper spray and someone else yelled out that there was a chemical attack. I think about those folks every once in a while, I feel like someone else should remember.

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exscapegoat@reddit

Older gen x here. I was in college for challenger and in my 30s and working for 9/11 A kid in my first grade class died in a car accident the day before we found out at school. Basically there were some moms crying outside the school and I found out from one of my classmates who blurted out the kid was dead. His uncle showed up to get his stuff and was crying. First time I ever saw a grown man cry. Beyond don’t chase balls into the street, the teacher didn’t say anything or talk to us about it. But she was a fairly new teacher and it was probably very rough on her to lose a student It was towards the end of the year No one really talked about it. Another kid died of a head injury from a fall a little over a year later. No one talked about those kids after they died. My family moved so don’t know if they got a yearbook dedication A kid in my new school died of leukemia. They talked about it somewhat but no counseling or how we felt. More focus on fundraising and how awful it was for him and his parents. In high school a girl in one the classes ahead of us was murdered and a sibling was in my grade. They didn’t talk about it at all. Another kid who at least had connections with our school was tried for the murder, but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. That family was understandably devastated. But no one really talked about it.

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cambeiu@reddit

Two very different events. The Challenger disaster was just sad and tragic, but did not make anyone feel unsafe or fearful. Life went on afterwards normally. After 9/11 Americans collectively lost their shit. People were freaking out about Anthrax attacks via letters. The Democratic Party controlled Senate passed the Patriot Act without reading it for 98 votes against 1. Torture and holding people indefinitely without charge became institutionalized. Completely different events with very different psychological impacts.

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Velocoraptor369@reddit

Like how you glossed over the fact that. (Checks notes) The 2000 election also produced for the first time a Senate with 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats.

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Secret_Cow_5053@reddit

Lived through both. 8 when challenger blew up, college when 9/11 happened (started late). 9/11 felt like the beginning of ww3 on that day.

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QueenShewolf@reddit (OP)

That is true. I always say 9/11 was the beginning of the end, but I digress.

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No-Hospital559@reddit

This was my worry watching from my rooftop in midtown. I remember the smell vividly. It lingered for months, then after that it would come back sneaking up on you when the wind changed. https://preview.redd.it/poggpjpzc3bd1.jpeg?width=1536&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e17a77abf33f6b97385e72bc7e79d0891e098c88

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SelectionNo3078@reddit

OBL’s primary goal was to trick the USA into starting wars in the Middle East and draining our treasury It worked

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cambeiu@reddit

In the "War On Terror" America was willing to sacrifice its core principles and destroy its soul in the process. He accomplished way more than he ever dreamed of. [A late 1990s movie with Denzel Washington was prophetic in warning us about this](https://youtu.be/WqS3gh9EFAY?si=xafLgS547VeNq2hd&t=85). But we did not listen.

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cambeiu@reddit

It was. People who are now freaking about about the "end of democracy" are 20+ years late. The time to freak out was back then, when the seeds were planted. Now it is the harvest.

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Malapple@reddit

Without contrasting the two very different events (with very different impacts), I will say that yeah - there were huge numbers of us watching that live and I saw no support or concern afterwards. The leaders and teachers at the time were often WWII or Vietnam war era peeps who didn’t find the idea of suddenly losing a bunch of people to be an odd thing in our society. In many ways we still don’t, but I do think we now acknowledge the impact. Absolutely got homework and no hugs. But we always got homework and rarely got hugs so that was normal. And I think that may have been the point. Life lesson: shit happens and you go on.

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AceOfStace27@reddit

Challenger was super traumatic at our school. What people dont realize is that the schools went ALL IN leading up to it. we had full-color booklets with photo bios of each astronaut. There was a whole curriculum designed around this and all the classrooms were watching it live. I was in 2nd grade. When it happened, we didnt fully understand. Like on one level, we got it. But it didnt make sense in our heads because we were so young. Our teachers though, they just shut down. Totall shock. I remember she just walked out of the room and left for a long time. Looking back, she was probably panicked about what to do. Then there was an announcement that there would be a school assembly. I dont remember it. I'm sure they prob said something about it being a tragedy and we should ask our parents if we had any questions? no idea. I just remember how lost Mrs Macauley looked. It was her shock that made me realize that something BAD had happened. I dont remember anyone talking about it to us after that at all. it's hard to say with 9/11. i dont know that it feels comparable because we just didnt know what was happening with 9/11 - were we under assault - like would we be invaded? would it happen more places? so i can see that being scarier. it felt very scary for me, even as an adult. which seems very different than the Challenger. 9/11 was also post-Columbine so I would assume teachers were more equipped to handle discussions around traumatic events than they were in the 80s?

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pearl_sparrow@reddit

I was in 5th grade. They brought all 3 5th grade classes into one room to watch it live. Rolled in the TVs on the green carts. When the explosion occurred, even the newscasters weren’t sure what had happened. Within a short time, a minute or 2 at the most, the screen was just an image of the smoke plume, and it must’ve become obvious to the teachers that we were watching a tragedy live. The TVs were quickly and quietly put away and we returned to class. No one talked about it the rest of the day. There was no opportunity to ask questions. I remember it being weird. This was before email. I’m not sure how the school communicated with our parents. I doubt they sent home any communication about it.

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WabiSabi0912@reddit

One was a public tragedy. The other was a terrorist attack. They’re fundamentally different.

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figuring_ItOut12@reddit

Schools and churches offered counseling. I didn’t know of anyone who personally refused to talk to their kids about it but I’m plenty sure many did. While both were traumatizing events 9/11 was an existential tragedy where adult authority figures were just as frightened as children which for a child is even worse than their own fear. I was pushing forty for 9/11 and had a newborn in daycare- by the time I heard about Pennsylvania I was in full blown panic.

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_Sasquatchy@reddit

Not remotely similar events. One was a tragic engineering disaster that almost every school child saw live in the classroom environment because of school teacher McAulliffe. The other was the worst terrorist attack in history financed by one of our supposed allies that fundamentally changed the world. There was no collective trauma from Challenger for Xers, just sadness and a lot of confusion. Kids were protected from the news back then. Our society was still invested in us being children without growing up too soon. That luxury didn't exist for my son who was 5 on 9/11. I've seen the Challenger footage maybe a dozen times in my lifetime. My son saw hundreds of shots of the towers falling by the time he graduated.

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Quercus408@reddit

Gonna chime in as a millennial and say that the Challenger Disaster was an unforseen and tragic accident of human engineering, whereas 9/11 was an act of terrorism resulting from our failing foreign policy.

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notevenapro@reddit

9/11 was as devastating as pearl harbor. Not even in the same league as the shuttle disaster.

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edistthebestcat@reddit

Despite the relative success of the shuttle program, most adults at the time considered space travel to be a risky proposition after having seen astronauts being burned up on the pad and nearly lost in space with the Apollo program. It was indeed rocket science and everyone knew if it went wrong it could be fatal. Sad for sure but not something that would alter their worldview.

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bad-wokester@reddit

Hey OP when you say The Challenger incident is why Gen-X is how it is, how is that? How is Gen-X perceived by your generation?

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Katy_Bar_the_Door@reddit

Very different events… but also different generations. No one at home said a word about challenger even though news reran it lots. School was like whelp that’s crazy, turn off tv, go back to regular classes. There was no processing or discussing. Many of my friends had kids by the time 9/11 happened, and we wouldn’t do the same to our kids.

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Strange-Difference94@reddit

We saw it, it was shocking and sad, it became history. It wasn’t formative beyond that.

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sloppyredditor@reddit

I was in elementary school. We saw it happen live on tv, talked about it for a few days... Then the jokes started and it became more a sad piece of history. We went back to being young and let the adults watch the analyses and follow-ups. A critical difference between our generations is in the media. “The news” went from being a print/morning and evening tv thing with some noteworthy op/ed articles to 24/7 tv, to a constant barrage of differing opinions in the span of 25 years. As others have noted, the deliberate nature of the 9/11 attack was much different in intent and scope. And boy did it work. We got terrorized and in a very real way (trillions on wars that don’t involve us, Patriot Act, TSA guidelines) we still are.

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YogaSkydiver@reddit

I was in fifth grade when I watched the Challenger explode and remember how utterly traumatizing that was. When 9/ 11 happened, I was an elementary school teacher. I remember that after hearing of the initiall crash into tower 1, some of the teachers turned on their classroom television sets and students ended up seeing the tragedy of the second tower unfold. I die not turn on the TV in my classroom foe my class. Because the circumstances (terrorism as a motivation) we're not yet fully known and because the children watching the events unfold were in Florida where immense high rises and skyscrapers are not really a thing, the kids absolutely could not comprehend the magnitude and gravity of the situation.

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sbfcqb@reddit

Challenger was very traumatic for me. I was 13, just a few months removed from the death of my grandfather, who was my absolute hero. I realize now that the timing probably allowed me to transfer my grief onto Challenger, letting me feel or express it easier. (The words aren't coming to me, sorry.) September 11 was 100 times worse. They took our own planes and used them against us. To use a phrase in vogue now, I didn't have that on my bingo card. Then to see the people jumping to their deaths, knowing that their mental anguish must have been so horrific. And the whole thing went on and on and on. I'm a Kansan so I don't experience it often, but hearing a plane overhead is still enough to make my heart race for a moment.

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LittleMoonBoot@reddit

I saw that Challenger meme and personally, it did not fit my experience with Challenger. My teacher didn’t say “whatever, here’s some homework.” If anyone needed a hug, it was our teacher. We didn’t watch it live because we were on the west coast and it happened just before class. She was called out, then later came in to tell us, and she was in tears. She was usually one of the meanest teachers I ever had, but that was a real human moment from her. I only remember us kids being shocked. Some of the boys I knew cracked tasteless jokes about it later on. We had a school-wide moment of silence the day after, so in many respects the event was taken very seriously at our school. That said, I don’t remember us talking about it much afterwards past the day after. I think a lot of us were raised in homes and by parents in that didn’t “talk”. I suppose that may be what the meme was trying to get at. As a generation, we did internalize a lot.

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JJQuantum@reddit

9/11 was way worse.

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TheGOODSh-tCo@reddit

Yes. I was 7 and wanted to be an astronaut. My mom let me stay home sick from school. That day altered my chosen career path, but never the dream. We had an assembly at school. Different than experiencing 9/11 as a 21 year old. That was terrifying bc we didn’t know how many planes they had, and we couldn’t believe our eyes at the towers. We thought we might have a family member at the towers that week and phone lines were too busy to get through. I was also a young active duty army wife, so I knew that day, our lives were about to change devastatingly.

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QueenShewolf@reddit (OP)

I had the same feeling. I knew things would change. My uncle was a fireman on 9/11, and we hoped he came out alive. Some of my classmates' family weren't so lucky.

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soso_chan_dayo@reddit

Seeing the Challenger disaster was a somber moment for Gen X, similar to how 9/11 impacted later generations.

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RunOrBike@reddit

Imho these are not comparable. One was a technical issue, the other a deliberate attack. One killed 7 people, the other one 3,000… In Germany, we talked about the Challenger disaster in several classes with our teachers. I was a space nerd back then and was sad, but felt they died for a purpose, for science. 9/11 in contrast was just a waste of lives.

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