yokelfelonking:

It’s been 18 years.  Most folks on this site were either children on September 11, 2001, or weren’t even born yet.  But America went crazy for about a year afterwards.  Here’s some highlights that I remember that might not be in your history books:

• There was national discussion on whether or not Halloween should be canceled because…fuck if I know why.  After planes crashed into buildings in NYC it follows that 6-year-olds in Iowa shouldn’t be allowed to dress up like Batman and ask their neighbors for candy, I guess.  (Halloween wasn’t canceled, by the way.)
• On a similar note, people asked if comedy – any sort of comedy – was appropriate anymore, ever.
• People sold shitty parachutes to suckers “in case your building gets
  attacked and you have to jump out the window.”
• As a follow-up to the attacks, someone mailed anthrax to some prominent politicians and news anchors – you know, famous people – along with some badly-written notes about “you cannot stop us, death to America, Allah is good” and after that every time some random dumbass found a package in the mail they didn’t recognize they thought that the terrorists were targeting them, too.
• People started taping up their windows and trying to make their houses or apartments airtight out of fear of chemical and biological attacks, and had to be told that turning your house into an airtight box was a bad idea because you need air to breathe.
• “If we do [X], the terrorists win!” was used as an argument for everything.  After a while, it became a running gag.
  
• People worked 9/11 into everything, and I mean everything, whether it was appropriate or not.  My uncle, who lived in Ohio and had never been to New York except to visit once in the 70′s, died of a stroke about 8 months after 9/11, and the priest brought up the attacks at the eulogy.
• On a similar local note, on the day of 9/11, after the towers went down, gas stations in my home town immediately jacked up gas prices.  The mayor had the cops go around and force them to take them back down.  I doubt any of that was legal.

Besides dumb shit like that…it’s really hard to overstate how completely the national mood and character changed in the span of a day, or how much of the current culture war is a result of the aftermath.