[Serious] Redditors who were In school the day of and after 9/11, what was it like? How did your school react to it?

I was 16, junior year, Sacramento. Because of the time difference, everything went down in the time between when I woke up and got to school.

It’s almost impossible to conceive of now, but it was still early in the Information Age. Internet was slow and it was still the Wild West, no nytimes.com. Your news came from newspapers (which had to be written, printed, and delivered) or more immediately TV and radio—but unless you had a VCR (in 2001 where I was no one knew what Tivo was yet) you had to watch the broadcast live or you missed it. So because I missed the window it took me the whole day to actually learn all the details of what happened.

I went to the library before first because it had a tv, and all it showed was Manhattan covered in smoke. It was another hour after that before I learned it was the second tower collapsing. I remember all of us sitting dead silent in my calculus class listening to the radio, just screams and chaos and little real information. It sounded like the world was ending, and in a lot of ways it was. Nothing got done that day. There was a...hush, a collective grief that fell over the country after. Maybe I felt it more sharply because of my age, but there wasn’t a separation between school and the adult world anymore. We had been initiated. By the end of the day the juniors and senior realized the implications of this. We’d be going to war with whomever attacked us, and it’d be our classmates enlisting or drafted. And for months after I was terrified every time I heard a plane’s engine in the sky.

2020 reminds me a lot of that period, actually, there was also the DC sniper, and then the anthrax letters, and Afghanistan, and the Columbia explosion. It was just this relentless period of awful.

/r/AskReddit Thread