I was telling someone much younger than myself that airports didn’t always completely suck to go through. I explained how the TSA wasn’t a thing and the experience was closer to getting on a bus or a train pre 9/11.
He had a hard time wrapping his head around it because he’s never experienced it.
Made me feel very old.
When I was very young, my mother took me and my twin to the airport, us wearing little backpacks.
She then handed us to a flight attendant and left.
The attendant took us to the air plane, sat us down, got us some juice. We sat and colored in books.
The attendant removed us from the plane and walked us towards the exit.
We then ran at grandmother and great grandmother. I’m fairly certain the attendant basically said “these yours?”, they said yes, and we left.
This happened over several summers.
The thought of that happening today is impossible
And then you tell them that baggage fees didn’t used to be a thing and you can see their train of thought go off the tracks.
As a post 9/11 adult, moving to a place with really good and smooth flowing train infrastructure made me so frustrated with the stressful and unnecessary security theatre of airports worldwide
I find the opposite more annoying. If your memory of those events is accurate there’s plenty of things to point to to back it up.
But then you have older people like my father who…I don’t know, something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history. It’s impossible to argue with that because of him seeing me pointing out that’s not true as an attack and accusing him of lying.
My favorite was arguing with a much older (late 70s) friend of my dad’s about how Obama ruined the economy and stock market, and when I told him that was objectively not true and the GFC was in full swing well before Obama was even elected, he was like “I know because I owned stocks and stuff, how would you even know?” Even when I pulled up a graph of the S&P 500 and showed the days he was elected and sworn in, he just said “Oh, that can’t be right, the graph must be wrong”. Showing the DOW and other composites from multiple sources did nothing to convince him. He was absolutely positive his retirement fund was doing great up until Obama was elected.
Yes Jerry, I’m sure that the entire stock market was just wrong, and it’s not the fact you consume nothing but FOX News and will only refer to the 44th president as “The N*gger” potentially causing a bit of bias.
On the other hand, there’s my dad defending Apartheid with the defence “you weren’t there”. The whole rest of the world from the time seemed to agreed with me, too, Dad.
It’s cute that Lemmy already has classic reposts
It’s not quite a historical event, more of a bit of trivia, but it seems to be common knowledge that it’s possible to cheat at Duck Hunt by pointing the light gun at a light bulb, making it register a hit every time, often repeated as a sort of “look how far we’ve come, those silly game devs in the 80s missing such an obvious exploit.”
Except it doesn’t work. The light gun checks for a frame of darkness followed by a frame of light. If it picks up light when it’s not supposed to, it counts it as a miss because it knows what you’re pointing at isn’t the screen at all. But people in all corners of the internet are absolutely convinced this trick was a thing for some reason.
Image Transcription: Twitter Post
brittany wilson, @sameoldstory
One disorientating thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well
Reminds me of the time I got a quiz question wrong; who was the first Man on the Moon.
I wasn’t born, but everything I’ve ever read said it was Neil Armstrong, so that’s what I answered.
The idiot quiz master said it was Buzz Aldrin (the second man). In disbelief, I tried to educate them of their error, only for the rest of the room, mainly boomers, to tell me I was wrong. Including one guy in his 80s who said “It was definitely Buzz. I watched it when it happened. I remember it well”.
I asked him “who said the famous ‘one small step for man’?”
Him: “Ahh yes, Now that was Armstrong.”
Me: “Surely Buzz would say those words if he was the first one out. I mean there is literally video of the event. You even watched it live”
Him: “Yes, it’s Armstrong in the video. But Buzz was definitely first out. Who do you think was holding the camera?”
Honestly it doesn’t seem to take very long at all. I watched live as the insurrectionists attempt to overturn democracy in the US during their failed auto-coup on January 6th less than 3 years ago.
Though there was some “it’s not real” talk in the immediate aftermath the idea that it was a false flag, antifa, not an insurrection, not a big deal, just tourists having an afternoon scroll, etc. seems to be growing.
I wonder why the “left wing radical Democrat antifa operatives engaging in a false flag attack to make Trump look bad” marched under banners with Trump’s name, admitted they were doing it for Trump, in some cases ran for office on the Republican ticket, and are actively being protected by Republican politicians.
Pretty astonishing when the whole thing was basically live streamed. I member watching it as it happened
Watching terrorist Ashli Babbitt get shot from multiple angles, then seeing comments from Trumpers like:
- She’s a hero
- She’s a false flag
- She’s not actually dead
- She didn’t do anything wrong
And this is barely two years. Going to bet a decade from now, the misinformation will be worse.
As an early GenX whose been online since the BBS days this happens all the time but honestly the historical revisionism isn’t main problems, it’s the loss of context around the history.
Reminds me of a Jon Stewart cutaway: “Context. It’s why old people are sad.”
Memories are worse than research
People are adamant that unpaid days off in the 90s meant people had to work without pay
Yeah, well what constitutes “research” these days is a couple of TikTok or YouTube videos from whatever the algorithm fed you.
I still regard post-9/11 as an aberration. It feels like if I accept it as the new normal I’ve failed some duty to humanity.
It made the world weird - especially politics. I still attribute the extreme polarization that we see today to the aftermath of 9/11.
Don’t get me wrong, I know people had strong opinions before 2001, but it didn’t seem like political party was as significant a part of the average person’s identity like it is now.
My “favorite” lecture from young people is the one in which they berate me for “stealing content” by not watching ads on YouTube.
I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things
