It just kinda seems like everyone is so divided and hates Eachother for disagreeing with each other.

30 comments

  1. Well, there’s been tragedies that seem to unify people (WW2 comes to mind). We saw that with George Floyd… but it became politicized.

  3. I’ve got a handful of South Asian and Middle Eastern Muslim friends and acquaintances who would rather we never return to the form of “unity” we experienced immediately after 9/11 ever again.

  5. Sure, if there’s another major terrorist attack or if nukes come flying around.

    Otherwise, it’s Sunni vs. Shia, at this point

  7. Oh yeah 100%

    I truly believe that the next generation or 2 is going to be a) totally fed up with and b) completely inoculated to our politicians and media corporations dividing us.

    It will soon enough reach a breaking point, where the common enemy is realized. And when that day comes, the unity will be quite nice to behold. Hopefully it happens in my lifetime.

  8. No not really, COVID killed over 100 times the amount of Americans then 9/11 but we were united for what, 2 weeks? Being united isn’t everything regardless, the post 9/11 unity was exploited to pass and do some very questionable things.

  10. For the most part, people are only “so divided” and hateful on the internet. Only the fringe crazies are actually willing to be such disagreeable douche canoes while they’re face to face with another human being. To answer your question though, the way to make people put aside their petty differences is to kill a bunch of other people

  13. Talk to people rather than getting your takes from social media. 99% of people are just fine and trying to live their life. I disagree with a lot of them on a lot of things but we have more in common than not.

  14. Im not exactly sure what kind of unity you’re talking about. I’ll be VERY honest here and say 9/11 did not have a huge emotional impact on me and it didn’t really change the way I felt about my life/safety/country at the time.

    Now here’s the the thing – I was 12.

    I had already lived through;
    The Oklahoma City bombing
    The 1996 Olympic bombing
    The murder of Jon-Benet Ramsey (a girl my age)
    and Columbine

    Not mention I knowledge of;
    Peal Harbor
    Nagasaki & Hiroshima
    The assassinations of Lincoln, JFK & MLK
    And the Birmingham Church Bombing

    9/11 to me was not us entering a new world where we needed to stand together. It was a world I was already living in.

  15. I think we as Americans have way more common that unites us than what divides us. What you see online does not accurately reflect real life.

  16. I think a better question is do we even want to be. The political fanaticism that we saw in the aftermath of that sad day never really went away, and leadership has by and large mostly just fed into it to keep it going. I say this as a New Yorker who was there at that time as well, no disrespect to the dead and their loved ones.

  18. It was not a great time to be anyone from the Middle East or looked like they were from the Middle East.

  19. I wouldn’t say we were very united – hate attacks towards Muslims (or anyone who looked like a Muslim) kicked off – I think on the very next day – Sept 12th a man was murdered in Phx.

    I think what you might (?) be thinking of that was united was the media – all of the news orgs were united against a common enemy.

    For united media messaging, I think the time for that has passed – there are too many variations. For example, if (God forbid) the same event happened, I think there would be thinkpieces which would dive into the reasons and open up the wider history of US imperialism etc. (BTW I have no desire to debate US imperialism on Reddit, this is just an overall media messaging idea).

  21. Given the COVID response and the odd pro-Russia bullshit from a certain corner, idk if even a land war with China would do it. There fringes are a minority of Americans, but they are a large and growing minority given the nature of social media and current news hellscape.

  22. I was 17 during 9/11. I didn’t feel we were unified, I felt as if we were all dealing with trauma together.

    America goes through periods of social/cultural/political unity/stability and then periods of instability. The revolutionary war was polarizing, the civil war era was extreme polarization, the great depression era had a lot of polarization. We are likely in another era right now. Sort of weird, all these historical eras are roughly a lifetime apart.

    These eras if instability are usually resolved at an end of crises and create an era of relative stability, at least for the majority cultural group (which for the last 3 has been white people, but became broader and broader). If I had to reach into my crystal ball, when we resolve our existential issues we will have another high era of relative stability.

    The last timeline had two remarkable guys who disagreed politically but were actually very close friends and thought highly of each other. John F Kennedy and Barry Goldwater. The best election in American history that we never got was 1964, JFK vs Goldwater. It was the rare instance where the two running against each other were actually legitimate friends and were going to campaign together. These were people who had different visions for America but didn’t actually hate each other.

    I would like to think that our timeline’s JFK and Goldwater are alive today, and are probably Millennials who were born in the mid-late 1990s.

  23. We do. Every time a foreign poster asks a dumbass question on this sub (especially a Frenchmen).

  24. America wasn’t “united” after 9/11, we *trauma-bonded*, then proceeded to murder unaffiliated Muslims (and innocent people idiots thought were Muslims) here in the US and over in the Middle East.

    I don’t want that shit to happen again.

  27. Not as long as we have major media outlets dedicated to misinforming the public and making them hate other parts of the population.

  28. It *wasn’t* united on Septermber 12th, 2001. There was in fact massive disagreement over what the correct response was; even hunting down and punishing the people responsible wasn’t something there was universal agreement on.

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