By Alexandra Dalton
Staff Writer
@alex_dalton04
Edgy people have always tried to make light of dark times so they will seem not as awful but laughing at Sept. 11 will never be hilarious to me.
I am not the first to stand up for patriotism, but this is something that just pushed my buttons. “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” “Bush did 9/11” or “Dick Cheney profited off the Iraq war” is not a way to honor the 3,000 plus victims from the largest terrorist attack on United States soil.
What is worse is people I respect and love made these jokes without a shred of remorse or hesitation.
There is absolutely no proof that “Bush did 9/11” or that “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”, but these jokes are increasing in popularity and are being spewed by kids, who have seemingly no problem disrespecting the memory of the terror that encapsulated that day for Americans forever.
My mother was one who always made me understand the gravity of this tragedy through documentaries or investigations and compelled me to grasp how it affected so many people in my country.
But even though this makes the new generation seem heartless, it really proves that they just do not remember. It is easy to make fun of something that you did not experience, and why not joke about it since it was not you who watched planes fly into occupied buildings in New York for the first time 14 years ago? I was 3 at the time so I did not have the mental capacity for digest what was happening. Now that I am older, I do.
“Since we were so young and we were so far from what was happening, it never really seemed like a real event,” Coppell High School senior Jack Sullivan said. “It didn’t have the same weight as a tragedy that would happen in our home or in our neighborhood. Because it was so far from us and we were so young, it seems more like a historical event than something that happened in our lifetime. People make Holocaust jokes all of the time because it is a historical event, I guess it is almost the same.”
Although the tragedy of 9/11 is remembered every year and reviewed in class, it is easy to become unaware of the gravity of its tragedy that affected the whole country.
“Our generations has been desensitized to terrorism because 9/11 happened when we were five so we have been growing up with all of these terrible things that seem normal to us,” CHS senior Emily Friis-Hansen said.
The problem is this: my generation has been surrounded by these horrors for so long they don’t know that they are horrors anymore. They are not disturbed by these jokes because they didn’t experience the pain of them.
“These were just jokes that I heard that I thought were funny so I repeated them, and that is the nature of memes and viral jokes,” Sullivan said. “You may not understand them but you laugh because they’re popular and funny. [Older] people don’t understand the type of humor that defines our generation. Their moral code prevents them from associating with the type of humor that is popular among today’s youth. There isn’t anything malicious behind [the humor], it’s just the way that we are.”
Adults cannot relate to this newfound sense of humor, and find these sayings as crazy conspiracies; not jokes to laugh about.
“I know 9/11 is real,” AP/GT English III teacher Zach Sherman said. “Anybody says differently is on YouTube and doesn’t deserve a YouTube account.”
Other teenagers have actual political opinions behind their humor. Friis-Hansen thinks President George W. Bush lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and does not agree with the United States invasion of Iraq.
“Bush is ridiculed in popular culture all of the time because he made a lot of mistakes and the fact that he completely lied when he said that the Iraqi people had weapons of mass destruction when they really didn’t is a testament to that,” Friis-Hansen said. “These jokes take into account that Bush ‘jokingly’ did 9/11 because he created [the weapons of mass destruction] as an excuse to wage a war on the ‘axis of evil’. He started what wasn’t even a credible war to begin with.”
Despite the reasoning behind these jokes, I still find them grotesque in nature because they mock a day in history that is very hard for most Americans. Laughing at the bloodshed of your country should not be topical or OK.
