The Red, White, and Blue Bar Fight of '01

September 11, 2001 was a watershed event in many people’s lives, and in all areas of our lives, including school. I remember the day with a fair amount of clarity like most millennials. I woke up around 6am as usual, made myself a small breakfast of, er, instant noodles (I was lazy) and went to school.

At some point during English class, a message over the intercom informed everyone that a “national emergency” was underway or something, and all teachers were instructed to turn on the televisions. I think some of the boys in the back were regretting having drunk cough syrup before school when they saw the towers on fire.

The rest of the classes of the day were spent discussing and/or watching coverage of the situation in NYC and Washington, An exception to this was my French class, where the teacher refused to turn on the television, insisting it was more important now than ever that we take studies seriously. Some nonsense like that, anyways. We kept conjugating.

Amongst some of the students - those who were neglected academically (to be blunt), there were wild rumors about who had even actually attacked us, with some saying it had been Israel (likely influenced by family). Others seemed to believe the Middle East itself was a single country out to get us. Some thought India was involved and became suspicious of Indians (there were a few locally - but no Muslims). (Please do not come for me for saying that the school and town neglected kids academically. They did, constantly, because America actually isn't very good at education. Not the kids' fault.)

In the weeks after, though, everyone - including those you’d usually expect to be snarky holdouts - showed up for the patriotism displays, the “God bless America” stickers on our agenda books, etc. There was an “emergency” (I guess) enactment of the tradition where students meet at the flagpole to pray in the morning. It was far from popular or required, but revived. Weirder things happened.

Websites (yes, those in the “domain scene” I was part of) started to make “9/11 tribute layouts” featuring mystic-looking depictions of the towers. There were never any memes making fun of the events or suggesting they were an “inside job.” On most sites, there was some discourse about whether George W. Bush could handle this situation. I saw a couple girls fighting and insulting each other’s HTML once. With a little digging I found out they actually only hated each other because one was pro-Bush and the other wasn’t.

Marketers and such tried to capitalize on the attacks, of course, but I think we all remember that. Heck, the whole era sadly was about that for some people, corporations, etc. When I visited the mall to finish up my back-to-school shopping that year with my mom, I even saw low-cut shirts with stylized designs clearly patterned after the structure of the towers (creepy, I know). There was red, white, and blue hairspray, despite dress codes. I wanted to try emo streaks of pink to see if I could, but didn’t dare.

Between September and Christmas they hosted a couple “Patriotic Assemblies.” I wasn’t sure exactly what those were - they were simply called “Patriotic Assemblies,” and we’d all gather in the gymnasium while the band played songs about America, or the choir folks sang, or people read their absolute best poems about how much they loved our country, etc. They didn’t last long, but they were tedious. I wonder how the kids on cough syrup felt about them, but they definitely went all-in with the sticky stuff. (My buddy Swim attended the school’s “Abstinence Education” lectures on large amounts of Benadryl, so it did become a trend.)

One of the strangest side effects occurred within that very English class I’d been sitting in when it all happened. The teacher, since the school year began, gave us a twice-weekly writing prompt. It was typically some short phrase or quote from a famous person, or just a word (ie, “soft clouds”). We then wrote a bit of short fiction inspired by the prompt, and that counted towards our final grade in the course. Initially, I found these tolerable if not always interesting. After September 11th, they became utterly insufferable.

Every. Single. Prompt. Focused on America. And how great it was. Occasionally there would be something vaguely-related (“and the battle is won”) thrown in there. I wrote most weeks to prompts that were patriotic slogans like “this land was made for you and me” and “that old red, white, and blue” as the prompts. I got tired of it after couple weeks and when the “that old red white and blue” prompt came across, I completely lost it, directly on the page.

I wrote a story that was about twice the required word count about a man who, after a bar fight over (white, snowy) cocaine, gets thrown out of a bar, bloody and covered in (blue) bruises. The teacher couldn’t exactly complain about the drug references, since I worked in a nice “Drugs are bad and ruin your life” message quite explicitly at the end, worthy of even the DARE program. In fact, that was all she wrote on my assignment was that I’d done a “good job” of talking about tough topics and should expand it into something longer about the dangers of drugs. She was clearly annoyed that it wasn't patriotic, though.

I just kind of clenched my teeth with the rest of the prompts until the parade of required patriotic writing eventually ended. I was annoying as a kid, but not enough to keep going with the bit. To be quite honest, after a while she added some about actual historical events (only the heroic parts, of course). I was happy to write short flash fiction about how a housewife or teenager might feel hearing news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor or something, for example - it was much more interesting than stuff like “Today’s prompt is Stars and Stripes Forever...”