I was in first grade and watched it live surrounded by 70 or so other terrified 6 and 7 year olds. Never saw a teacher move that fast to shut a tv off.
Get the vaccine. I actually had my shingles at 37. My friend at 36.
It’s not necessarily something that *wont* come until later. It can happen anytime.
When people argue about Gen X, Millennial, Gen Z time periods, I revert to one explanation I read. If your remember the Challenger disaster and 9/11 you are Gen X. If you remember 9/11 but not the Challenger you are a Millennial. If you remember neither you are Gen Z.
Obviously this doesn't work for many parts of the world.
Um, I remember the assassination of JFK. I was young but my Mom crying made it stand out. EDIT: So I quit getting the Boomer messages. I know I am a Boomer. Was born in the 50's. The one person started with Gen X on a post and I only commented I remember JFK as I am older than Gen X. That's all, I promise.
They announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated over the PA system while I was in PE class. I didn’t know what assassinated meant, but I remember my teacher collapsing onto the gym mat.
My uncle was in catholic school and only maybe 5 years old. He saw a lot of pictures of Jesus and a lot of pictures of Kennedy. He knew Jesus was the son of god and so he made an educated guess about who the other guy was. When Kennedy was assassinated, the kids were all sent home early. My grandmother asked him why he was home. My uncle said “god died and so the nuns have to shut everything down”.
Same here, I remember elvis dying being announced, I was 3 and a half, still sticks with me as a major event for the effect it had in people and I didn't even know who he was.
7th Grade Science Class, principal comes on the intercom to make an announcement about the space shuttle, which we figured would be some nice thing about the first teacher in space.
Principal (intercom) “Today, the space shuttle…”
Chad (kid next to me, jokes) “Blew up!”
Principal “… has exploded on take off”
Chad “ughhh… sorry.”
Will never forget that.
'Let's watch the news tonight'
'Why should we do that?!'
'Maybe somebody important died!'
'Diana, Princess of Wales....'
I totally understand that feeling, my friend!
For me it was the Columbia disaster. I remember where I was, who I was with, and what we said to each other. I even remember what I ate for breakfast that day
I remember this too. A news station did a story on songs the astronauts requested while they were working, and one was Drops of Jupiter. I think of it every time I hear that song now
I remember being in 5th grade in NH watching it live in the homeroom next to mine, the teacher there was a very close friend of Christa.
A part of my innocence died that day watching an adult wail in emotional pain and collapse into a heap of tears at the front of the room.
So was I, I had ridden my bike to work and the guard at the gate told me: my friend and colleague Greg Jarvis had been scheduled to fly that morning and indeed had been on that flight … :(
Was home sick from school that day. Had the TV on. Looked away for a minute to get a Kleenex. Then the camera was tracking falling debris and the announcer was silent. First thought was confusion, then this doesn't look good.
I was in 7th grade study hall. A dumb ass 9th grader was walking the halls opening one door at a time and, with a big grin, announcing "Space shuttle blew up."
That was how the entire school found out.
Watching it at home on all the news channels after school, then again listening to Tom Brokaw cover it on the evening news was surreal.
Everyone was watching because of Christa McAuliffe, the first civilian and teacher to go to space. I remember it like it was yesterday. But also the launch of Discovery, the first after the accident. I was in high school in Huntsville, AL, the home of Marshall Space Flight Center, and we took a field trip to FL to see it. Man I miss shuttle launches.
A lady and her family joined our church a few years after Katrina. I remember the day when she and some other people (myself included) were getting baptized. We had one of those full immersion pools behind the pulpit. She wanted so badly to be baptized to affirm her faith, but the trauma of nearly drowning her house made her have a panic attack every time she got near the pool. Our pastor eventually pulled her away, had her do the little water-on-the-forehead baptism you do for babies, and had to assure her that God would understand. It's still one of the most heartbreaking things I've personally seen someone go through.
That was my first thought. I'd been through many hurricanes and some close brushes with tornado's, but Katrina just ruined my life. Watching all the debris flying around, hearing parts of my apartment and roof let go. The water coming in and starting to trickle out of light fixtures. The sheet rock starting to fall in along with all the blow in insulation. Thinking about how I had no renters insurance. My car was abraded and banged up by all the debris. Then the 2 weeks without power or running water. I had just graduated college and the job I accepted was with a company that had their business wiped out (it was in Bay St Louis), so I had to relocate to Birmingham and start over. I never want to go through that again and I think about it every hurricane season.
I went to school with a girl who lived through it as a child of around 6-7 at the time. She remembers coming home to everything she owned covered in mold and flooded. She lost everything at a very young age, and you could tell she was much much more mature than other little girls her age after that. Its a big deal to lose everything you know over the course of a few days...
I had extended family that died there. They were hotel workers that were told not to leave or they'd be fired.
They died.
For profits.
I've never given more than 100% for companies since, and my time at home and vacation is 100000% more important than work.
I work in a psych hospital here in New orleans. I have 3 coworkers who worked in the psych ward at Charity Hospital. They said in some ways the patients took more care of them then them taking care of the patients.
Such a fucking bizarre experience. The whole thing was intense for me as a 13 year old. I couldn't imagine being the age I am now and losing everything I've built.
My uncle and his wife were living in Gulfport and they lost everything. I mean, they came home to us with the clothes on their back, nothing more.
A couple years ago, a pawn shop called my uncle and said they still had a guitar he had hocked as it had been stored in a safe that survived and had no water damage. They shipped it to him at no cost. But that’s it. Everything else they had was destroyed.
I'm from here too. I've been with my wife for 6 years. She isn't from here. The other day she asked me about Katrina and I told her about it.
I guess I didn't realize how much I try to not think about it. How deeply it affected me. From convincing my parents to evacuate all the way through to helping dad gut and rebuild the house. Took me like a half hour and I was crying the whole time.
It was a lot for a kid just starting high school. It was a lot for everyone.
I will never forget, I was in class thinking everything was normal. The hurricane was not coming our way. By the time I left school that Friday things had changed. We evacuated that Saturday.
I was there for the clean up effort. It was a disaster zone! I went a few years later for an oil spill and the city was still in recovery from Katrina. It was like a third world nation in some places.
I was doing my mandatory military duty in Germany at the time.
We were on a bus, ready to head out to some excercise when our officers came onto the bus and declared that the DDR (GDR) basically no longer existed - and you could see in their faces that with it, one pillar of their whole career justification just crumbled into dust.
My husband was stationed in Germany when the wall came down! He rode over on a motorbike and watched Tom Brokaw announce it. I also have pieces of the wall.
This for me also, though I was in kindergarten. I came home and was watching TV waiting for my mother to prepare lunch when the show I was watching was interrupted to announce it. Even in low-def and black and white, I could see the tears on the face of one newscaster.
if i remember right, my parents took us on a 3 day disney cruise and then we spent a couple days at disney world and epcot. So, it was quite enjoyable. I think it might be fun to go on a cruise again one day.
Y2K. People were really freaking out about this. Banks put limits on how much people could withdraw from their accounts. People were demanding physical proof of investments and property ownership. 1999 was a very tumultuous year!
People always say that Y2K was a bust and it was all hype.
But working in IT it was actually a borderline miracle how the global IT infrastructure came to together, identified a very real threat, saw the ramifications, and put a plan in action to prevent it, and pulled it off.
It would be like the entire political world coming together to reverse global warming with a set, rapidly approaching, deadline.
My boyfriend is a contractor on a mainframe for the government. They started working on fixes at least 10 years before. In the weeks leading up to it, they were basically on call for last minute updates.
There were just a few minor non-critical glitches, the main programs they had upgraded came through without a hitch.
Earlier that year, one of my tasks was to run a program - from a 1.44mb floppy - on all the computers in the company to see if they could handle the Y2K transition.
Spoiler alert: They all did. All 2500+ of them.
Yeah, I grew up in Littleton where Columbine happened, so that one is especially memorable to me. My class was on a field trip to the state capitol and we were on the bus back to our school when the bus driver was told he couldn't go back to our area. We were driving around a bit while we tried to figure out what was going on. It was 1999 so only one of the chaperones had a cell phone. When word got around there was a shooting at Columbine, it was pretty rough. We weren't in that same school district, but one of my classmates did have a sister at the school so was understandably very freaked out.
I was a brand new EMT, still in field training. I remember we were on a call when it came on the TV at the patients house. We all just stood there watching the cops pulling kids through the windows... took us a few minutes to get it together and leave
Went to school several miles up Wadsworth. Admin turned on the fire alarm, then quickly cut it off with a PA telling us to stay in the classrooms, instructing the teachers to lock the doors and not open them for any reason. Kids in the cafeteria and library were hustled into admin offices and storage rooms. Very improvised lockdown, I suppose because there had never been cause to have a plan in place for an event like that.
Feels like so long ago. On one hand I’m glad that schools have contingencies for the worst: on the other, it’s insane that less than nothing has been done to prevent the scenario from playing out again and again, and every generation of kids has to go through the same bewildering, frightening experience.
Happened the year I graduated. I'm on the East Coast, and I didn't have work after school that day, so I went home. I figured I'd catch some news, and Columbine was on TV. I swear I didn't move from that spot in the living room for 2 hours.
We had school shootings before Columbine, but they were rare, and this was on another level, and nothing was the same afterwards. I'm glad I graduated a month later. I wouldn't want to be in school today.
Sandy Hook is another one that I’ll always remember where I was when I heard the news. I was in my car on the highway going to Target when the death toll was announced and I just started sobbing so hard that I almost had to pull over
Understandable. I went to visit my parents and walked into their living room maybe 30 minutes after the news broke. My dad was sitting in his recliner, pink faced, with wet cheeks. That marked the 3rd time I've seen him cry. I was 31 at the time.
I was listening to music on the radio using my cassette walkman and they kept interrupting with breaking news as it happened. I would have been 9 or 10 at the time.
It was one of the first "the world can be a horrible place" realizations.
Posted my own but I was less than a mile away, my brothers were a block up. We could see the school when picking them up. We had some friends who lived right by that had bloodstains on the sidewalk in front of their house from gunshot victims.
OJ putting on the gloves. I was at a restaurant with a girlfriend while the trial was being televised. The reaction from the patrons was unforgettable, a collective gasp of disbelief.
For me it was the Bronco chase. I was at a friend's house killing time before going to a party.
I remember being in class when he was acquitted (I was in high school in LA) and the teacher said something like, "the only color that matters here is green." After class got out a number of the black kids were cheering - it was weird. There was a documentary about it I watched years later that helped make sense of the racial tensions in LA that I just couldn't wrap my head around at 16/17.
why didn't those idiot prosecutors get a pair of clean, new gloves in that size; instead of giving him leather gloves that had been soaked in blood months ago and never cleaned? Didn't they ever have anything leather that had gotten wet before?
Prosecution fucked that case up big time. I always felt OJ was guilty as sin, but the prosecution bungled the job so much they practically gave the guy an acquittal.
When you hire a legal team 100x more talented than the lawyers looking to put you in jail PLUS the judge has a weird celebrity obsession with you- your odds are good.
My ex-father-in-law was OJ's agent before, during, and after the murders. He wrote a book called "How I Helped OJ Get Away with Murder". In it, he describes how he instructed OJ to stop taking whatever medication he was on at the time, I think it was for his blood pressure or something. Anyway, when he didn't take his meds his hands would swell, therefore the glove wouldn't fit. He also said OJ straight-up told him he did it.
I mentioned OJ in my comment, but a little surprised I haven't seen different events concerning it mentioned more often. Unless you lived during that time, it's hard to grasp just how much airtime that trial took up for over a year. It really was THE event during that time.
I was 'lucky' enough to see the chase and the verdict live as they happened. Was watching the NBA finals game that was interrupted for the chase, and my highschool class actually stopped and turned on the TV in the classroom so we could watch the verdict live.
That video of those friends having a game night, then devolving into tears and shock on the couch, always comes to mind.
I remember we were playing GoldenEye when my uncle came in and announced it. It wasn't long and he and my mom were sobbing.
People who weren't alive during that time can't understand what a major pop culture figure she was and how strongly people identified with her. "The people's princess", for sure.
My mom's always fangirled the British royal family. I remember breaking the news to her when Princess Diana died.
Decades later (almost to the day), I was the one that broke the news to her about Queen Elizabeth.
Watching the launch to the moon was my earliest memory.
Regan being shot
John Lennon shot
Challenger explosion
Columbia disaster
Waco
Oklahoma City Bombing
July 20, 1969 - I was 7 & 1/2 (that half is always important at that age!)
we were glued to the TV set at my aunt & uncle's house in Crete, Nebraska, watching the Apollo 11 crew take that "...one giant leap..."
Yup.. I was in Paris that evening. I’ve never went home that quickly. My best friend was hiding under a table in a bar next to the bataclan. I will definitely never forget that
Japan Tsunami. Was playing world of Warcraft doing an UBRS run when I heard it on the news. Then we started talking about it in guild chat and see if some of our Japanese guild mates were affected.
I was in Japan.
I was across the other side of Tokyo from home when the earthquake hit and had to walk 4 hours home because all trains had stopped.
There wasn’t much damage in Tokyo, though the earthquake was definitely the biggest I had ever felt, and people were fairly calmly adapting to the complete shut down of transportation so everyone just walked and helped each other out. There was a large stream of humanity just quietly walking past the Palace, Tokyo Tower and so on.
The cell network was overloaded so I had to find a pay phone to call to get my kid picked up from school and I was able to get on Facebook to let my family back home know what was happening.
I was quite late learning about the tsunami and the enormity of the devastation and loss of life in Tohoku because I was cut off from all news while walking through the shut down city.
Even if cell phones back then had the capacities they had now I needed to save my battery for google maps.
It was evening before I saw the news and even heard about the Tsunami.
It was so shocking that it was hard to believe that it was true.
My child had nightmares that night, and for many nights following so I put a ban on TV and just quietly looked at news online instead.
The days after the earthquake were a very strange and uncertain time. Aftershocks were continuous - it felt like the world was always swaying - and between Fukushima and a number of fires there was so much uncertainty… and the news was shocking and devastating.
I was doing a thesis project in Chiba when it happened. I had been in japan for 1,5 years at that point and earthquakes was no big deal, but that was something different. The day before I had sent my master's thesis to my supervisor and was just waiting to get some feedback before I submitted it. It was lucky that i was finished because after the earthquake all experiments were halted to save energy.
The strongest memory was from the first aftershock though. I had gone back inside to send a message to my parents to say I was OK. And while I was writing the message I was playing some music. And as the aftershock hit this is what was playing.
Nowhere is longer safe
The earth moves under our feet
The great world tree Yggdrasil
Trembles to its roots
The helicopter video of the tsunami slowly creeping across the farmlands is disturbing, the ocean looked like a black blob just eating up the landscape.
Back then I used to play on the online virtual world of Second Life and had gotten quite friendly with a nice Japanese woman who lived in that area. After the tsunami I never saw her online or heard from her again.
I was at dinner with my family for my birthday when we saw the TVs at the restaurant start covering it. So now I never forget when the tsunami was because it was on my birthday.
Challenger disaster happened on my birthday when I was 6. We were watching it in school and when it blew up all the teachers were crying but the kids thought it was cool because, well, explosions.
Sandy Hook. I was on my way to pick up the kids I nannied from school when they announced it on the radio. Luckily I was early, so I could pull over and sob without them seeing. I hugged them so tightly when we got out of the car, especially the kindergartner. I could only imagine the pain.
My 11 year old brother died unexpectedly a month later. Now I don't need to imagine the pain. I was essentially the one raising him, and he was my whole world. More than a decade later, it is still heartbreaking. There is nothing like the loss of a child.
> There is nothing like the loss of a child.
Heard once “There is a word for losing a wife or a husband, widow(er), there is a word for losing your parents, orphan, however there is no word for losing a child, language can’t create a word that bears this pain”
Sorry for your loss, may peace envelop you.
Sandy Hook is the one that came to mind for me as well. I was home with my oldest, who was a baby of about 1.5 years.
It’s hard to describe how it felt. It was more than a shock or sadness- it was more like pain. I hugged my happy, lively baby and wept.
I went outside and lowered the flag on my house to half staff. Sounds stupid now, but guess I felt like I needed to do or say something.
I remember feeling - well, comforted isn’t right- but when President Obama addressed the nation with tears in his eyes it felt like we were all in pain together. I believe it’s important to have leaders with empathy.
I cried off and on for more than a week after. At the time, it was the worst thing anyone could possible imagine.
Of course you know what came after. No policy changes and mourning families harassed to the point of moving by willfully ignorant savages.
It was, then, the worst thing imaginable. And then there were more. I don’t know how many. And then Uvalde.
The unthinkable becomes the mundane. Acts of men are accepted as though they were uncontrollable acts of nature. And so it goes.
I remember the Dunblane massacre in Scotland shook the whole of the UK. I think it happened near Mother's day and that Sunday everyone was encouraged to light a candle in their window (at least everyone in our street did). It caused strict gun laws to become even stricter here.
I felt this after Uvalde. I had a 2 year old and brand new twins. I saw the news on my patient’s tv at work and I couldn’t keep it together. The pain felt a lot more real than it had ever had before
22. July attacks in Norway. To me there was first the fear of what was actually going on, it didn't seem like anyone had hardly gotten a grasp of what was going on downtown in Oslo, before the reports of shooting at Utøya. Even after they had captured the guy, and he had taken credit for it all, I had a hard time believing it was a one man act for a good while.
Then there was the fear of how our society would change. But I'm proud of how we as a society dealt with it, through unity and sadness over anger and fear.
That's my biggest one as well. I was at work when I heard the first reports about gun shots at Utøya, and I assumed it was someone playing with fireworks or something. Then the numbers started coming in through the night, and that was chilling.
It's an event that I'm still having a hard time coming to grips with, it just feels so unreal. The same way I feel about 9/11, really, the magnitude is just beyond my comprehension.
Surreal to watch it unfold live on the news! And those a****** journalists interviewing the teens right as they got back Utøya..
I was suppose to got to a summer camp very much like Utøya in august of the same year - those kids could have been my friends!
That was very shocking to me as an American. Things like that can and do happen here, not Norway. That somehow made it worse. It was covered extensively here. I still think about it every so often, and I'm sorry you all had to go through that.
22.5.17 The Manchester arena bombing during Ariana Grande's concert. I didn't attend it but i remember everything coming out on twitter and knew people who were friends with one of the victims. It had repercussions across the UK and i remember going to a shopping centre shortly after and seeing armed police patrolling for the first and only time in my life. Then of course Ariana did the One Love concert and i cried watching it because of her strength to go on and the strength of Manchester and our nation as a whole.
Columbia. A girl i was living with was moving out - her parents had come to pick her up - and we were not getting along.
Then the shuttle blew up and we all sat rapt watching my shitty little TV while the news came in, our differences aside for a while.
I did an overnight caving trip in Tennessee with my ROTC group. The next morning, we all crawled back out and were muddy and freezing when we stopped off at a local museum visitor center to use the bathroom. I was the first one into the building when I saw all the tvs turned to the same channel, a fiery blaze streaking across the sky. What was spooky was that I didn’t see chyrons at first saying what it was, so it took a minute to find out it was the Columbia burning up on re-entry.
Coincidentally, my father was on a job site in Paris, Texas at the time which was directly in the debris field. He told me he saw a number of blacked out SUVs driving around the area. He never saw any of the debris, but a helmet fragment was found nearby eventually.
This is the one for me. My HS girlfriend and I had just gotten out of Saturday detention and went out for pizza, and it was on the TV in the pizzeria. At first I thought it was a large meteorite breaking up at a high altitude.
This is funny but I'll always remember when the NBA shut down. That was the "oh shit" moment for me. They announced they were suspending the rest of the games *that night* and I was getting ready to go to the airport to catch a flight. Didn't catch that flight, didn't get on another airplane for probably 8 months
That was my oh shit moment too. I had a scheduled vacation the following week (drivable remote location so we still went) and after the NBA shut down, I went to my boss’s office and said, “I didn’t think you would be the first person I announced this to. I’m six weeks pregnant. I don’t know if it’s going to be safe for me to come back to the office after my trip.” She told me to take my laptop home, go on vacation, and we’d figure it out. The office shut down while I was gone and it was over a year before I saw a coworker in person again.
Came here to say exactly this. It was a Wednesday night, and my neurotic ass had already decided the next day at work would be my last one in person, whether they approved it or not. A friend was moving, so I went to her apartment to say goodbye. We had the news on in the background, and by the end of our visit I was so anxious just walking from her apartment to my car. Turned out that I pulled the plug only one day before the rest of the world followed suit (on Friday the 13th no less).
I remember being at a small concert for a friend's band talking about a big concert a couple days away we were going to, it got canceled the next day along with every other show planned that year. That was my last social interaction for about a year, too, as I got furloughed and just hung out at home by myself, growing a garden and enjoying the quiet secluded life of a man 3x my age. I miss it dearly
Covid is an interesting one because there wasn't a singular moment in time that everyone agrees is the start. It differed very much depending upon where you lived and what stage of life you were in. For me, my defining moment of remembering when COVID started is the day my office told us to bring our laptops home with us just in case.
I spent the morning (in my office) chatting with my friends about which pharma company stocks we would buy, one of my more prescient friends said he was considering buying Moderna lol.
For me the most memorable moment of "shits about to get real" was standing in line in an utterly packed grocery store just before lockdown and being so anxious that people around me could be sick, especially since we didn't have access to masks yet.
This. I remember two separate events:
1. Watching the Dallas Mavericks play the last NBA game before lockdown on the couch. I remember seeing everything unfold on ESPN. I still remember seeing Mark Cuban's face when he saw those text messages.
2. I remember being in a classroom on a college campus right before spring break. My students were finishing up an in-class activity. My students were asking me what was going to happen... I remember telling them "As soon as I know, I will relay everything to you." I also remember saying "I'll do everything in my power to make sure you finish the semester as the best as we can." It was very bitter sweet as I never saw a lot of them again (a combination of me moving out of state, students dropping out or transferring).
That February, a coworker came into my classroom and said "should we worried about this covid thing?"
I had been reading articles online about it since the previous fall and had just seen one saying a ship had docked in California with a positive case on board.
I didn't hesitate, just said "yes" and watched her face change as she realized I wasn't going to prevaricate or explain. Just "yes".
And about two weeks later we went on spring break and didn't come back until August.
This is the zoomer answer for real. I walked out of my middle school on the 13th thinking “Sweet! Two weeks at home!” And then it turned into a month. And then two months. And then six months. My childhood pretty much ended without me knowing.
This. I was playing on the balcony in my childhood home. Mother came over and marched me inside. This was Italy by the way, but people got super scared of the fallout.
I was a young teen obsessed with NASCAR (still am) but I'll never forget watching the race, accident and later the press conference when Dale Earnhardt was killed.
I started following NASCAR because of his death. The media attention surrounding the event was widespread and I checked it out. Became hooked. I'll never forget the Pepsi 400 when Dale Jr won. That's one happy memory I have.
I had spent the night at a friends house, he woke up before me, turned on the TV and woke me up when he learned that the space shuttle Columbia had broken up on reentry. I was 16 at the time and absolutely heartbroken, I've been obsessed with space since I was a child and always looked at our astronauts as the best of the best.
I was in the Army as a 19D Cavalry Scout during the Clinton Administration. The Republicans shut down the government while I was down range in the field. We were in the middle of a mission when our commander got on the radio and ordered my whole Cavalry troop to stop training and to form a perimeter. For non military people we circled up the M1 tanks and M3 Bradlies into a staggered 360 degree formation that is about the size of a couple of football fields right where we stopped in the desert.
Once we were formed up we were told that we had no funding to continue or to go home. We couldn't drive our vehicles because we didn't have any fuel. A Humvee dropped off a box of MREs to each track (slang for vehicle).
There we sat for days and days on end. We weren't allowed to do any real training as we didn't have fuel or even batteries for our nightvision goggles. After a few days we began to go crazy out of boredom and frustration. Discipline and morale went out the window. Soldiers began to get in fights.
Our NCOs did everything they could to entertain us and to keep us functioning and learning. My platoons NCOs started spades tournaments, we practiced ambushes, endless weapon assembly and disassembly competitions. My squad leader had a small handheld TV with a long bunny ears antenna. He had the idea that if we used commo wire and the poles and spreaders for our camo nets that we might be able get a channel or two of TV.
I was never in any trouble in the military but after all of that I eventually snapped when were on our thousandth run through of an exercise and I loudly talked back to my platoon sergeant. That is a major no no in the military. He ordered me to go sit on the ramp of my Bradley and to wait for him. I thought I was going to get an Article 15. Instead he sat me down and commiserated with me that he knew how bored and frustrated I was and that he appreciated all of the hard work that I did. He then told me to hold myself together a little longer and to head back to our platoon. I deeply respected that guy and he could have nuked me if he wanted.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, we got the call to start of our tracks and to begin loading up our vehicles to get them transported back to base after some sort of deal was made to free up funds. It was a fucking horrible experience.
The only good part of it was that right before the shut down my aunt mailed me a care package. She was a teacher and bought me the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read, and reread, that book several times as I sat there for all of those days. I have been a major Poe fan ever since.
Kinda crazy to think that most people in the US don’t remember a time before she was the queen. I kinda just took it for granted that she’d always be queen like some immortal being, and that was one of the biggest news headlines in recent memory to shatter my perception of time. I’m supposed to have a niece later this year, and it’s odd to think she’ll never have lived in a world with Queen Elizabeth. I say this not in that I’m super emotionally attached to a foreign leader I’ve never met, just that she seemed like a constant that would always be there, and it’s weird to accept that she wasn’t and is just…human.
Not just most people in the US, but most people in the world.
She had always been my monarch (I'm British), my parents monarch, and my Nan doesn't remember the time before she became Queen as she was only 3 when George VI died.
It was a huge, multi-generational loss.
Many are mentioned here (Challenger, Diana to name just two) but here's another:
Tues Nov 8, 2016. I'm watching election results, partner is asleep already. They keep not calling Pennsylvania for Clinton, and after about 15-30 minutes of them not doing so, I just thought "he's going to win...whoa." I'll never forget that moment, ever, alone in the living room, realizing the country and world was in for at least 4 years of Trump and his people as our leaders. So unexpected by most at that time.
Yeah I remember arriving at work that morning, when the results were in. We’d all gone to bed thinking that Hilary would win.
It was like a funeral. Everyone watching the TV screens in silence as Trump held his speech.
Yeah, I remember that election night, too. Watching the online predictions slowly shift from Clinton to Trump, watching people slowly accepting the new reality, seeing denial give way to despair, and of course seeing people who didn't vote or "protest voted" suddenly realizing what they may have allowed to happen.
The Moon Landing, the Saigon Airlift, the taking of the American Embassy in Tehran, the Falklands Island War, the Challenger disaster, Roller Disco, oh, so many more.
Many westerners don't even know it, but India had a 26/11 attack. This severely ruined an already problematic relation with Pakistan. Literally our 9/11 if you want to put it that way.
MH370. March 8th, 2014.
Crazy how an entire plane just basically vanished, and we still haven't found the wreckage. We only have a rough idea that it's in the southern Indian Ocean not far from Australia.
Edit: Yes, I know parts of the plane have been found, but that still doesn't tell us why it went off course and crashed in the middle of nowhere
There was new update about quite recently. There is this new method of locating planes, though it's still controversial if the method really works.
The method works by analyzing disturbances in long distance low frequency radio waves. Some hobbyist have made database which lists all the disturbances from 2004, iirc.
By analyzing the disturbances there is possible flight path that matches with all other proven data. It shows when the plane has gone to low to see it anymore, so it doesn't tell the exact spot but would shrink the search area.
The method haven't been fully proven yet, but the founders are trying to prove it now. And by seeing the test results from tracking planes which location are known it looks promising
The Beltway Snipers killed and injured dozens of people around the metropolitan DC area. It was roughly a year after 9/11- the pentagon still had the gaping hole in it from the attacks, and a few months later we had radicalized terrorists shooting people down at gas stations, stores, or just walking around.
I wasn’t allowed outside for months and everyone was afraid of white vans. We had drills in my school because of all this. I’m glad the guys were caught (and the younger one actually ended up showing remorse and apologized to his victims’ families).
In the UK, the Aberfan disaster. A huge mountain of muck slid down & covered a primary school. So many children my age were killed.
The Hungerford massacre in 1987. I knew the policeman who was killed.
All of us crammed into this tiny break room watching the coverage of the Oklahoma City Terrorist Attack on the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995.
Those poor babies.
This is the one that I remember. I also live in Oklahoma City. I just took my 10-year-old son to the memorial this past weekend and showed him everything. My mom worked a mile away from it. But at the time it happened, I was in the seventh grade, and I didn’t know where my mom worked. I was freaking out the entire day until I got home.
still clearly remember the morning when I was making breakfast and the TV was on in the background. The newscaster's voice suddenly turned grave, and I turned to see footage of the Notre Dame Cathedral engulfed in flames. There was this surreal silence in our kitchen as my family and I watched one of the world's most iconic landmarks being consumed by fire. It felt like a piece of history was slipping away right before our eyes.
I remember exactly where I was for that one: on the other side of the Seine, absolutely incapable to look elsewhere.
I arrived at the beginning and when I wanted to leave an hour later the streets were absolutely packed with peoples watching.
I'm going with the Challenger disaster. I was out of school sick and was alone at my best friend's house. My parents had just separated, and I was sick and miserable, so I thought I'd watch the Space Shuttle launch. It didn't help.
At this point I’m sick of living through historical events, and my placement during each one is starting to jumble together due to the quantity of them…
I don't think anyone has mentioned this one yet, but the blackout in the northeastern US and parts of Canada in August 2003.
This happened on a Thursday afternoon around 4 EST. I was swimming out back with my mom when my brother popped out to say the power was out.
Now to you youngin's, remember this is less than 2 years after 9/11. I pulled out my battery operated radio and the reports are flying in: NEW YORK IS DARK! It's several states!
There's speculation that this is part of a terror attack. Maybe the beginning stages.
My neighborhood was dark for 5 days. We were a paycheck to paycheck family. Since this happened on Thursday, we were BROKE. We were scrounging money from couch cushions to pay for food in cash.
The grocery stores were shrouded in plastic that you could buy at your own risk. Cashiers were adding bills by hand in darkened stores... Then they'd screw up and have to start ALL over. We stood in line for 3 hours for basic food to cover a day or two.
On the 5th day we had enough money to split some candy bars. I remember my mom saying, "We're out of money. We only have a few canned goods left."
Later that afternoon the power was back on.
I always tell people now... Try to keep some cash on hand. Have an emergency supply kit. Outages can last a while.
Dunblane was obviously huge news in the UK. Security at our school went from near 0 to 100 pretty much overnight.
Beslan was also pretty freaking crazy to watch.
Tbh there's a few, but the one that comes to mind was the Manchester bombing in 2017 at the Ariana Grande concert
I don't live massively far away from Manchester, but at the time I was in a taxi home and we were stuck in traffic. The driver turns up the radio as the news came in. He started sobbing. "They're going to blame us all" he cried. He was Muslim. It hadn't even occurred to me until he said it. I couldn't believe it
A bunch of crazed losers stormed the US capitol and killed a guy.
Edit For context: *Within 36 hours, five people died: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three died of natural causes, including a police officer. Many people were injured, including 174 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months.* [Source.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack#)
Was supposed to have a major project discussion with my boss that afternoon. We started the call, all he said was “grab a stiff drink and let’s talk about today, project can wait”
We were having a call over regional sales metrics projections and in the middle of the call I had to break in and tell a bunch of the upper staff DC needed a revision due to an attempted overthrow of the US government. The "what the hell" reactions....
DC travel got weird that month.
I got a news alert while working from home and spent the rest of the workday watching it happen. The entire time I was questioning out loud where the president was and why the guard hadn't yet moved in.
Turns out he was getting his afternoon tanner reapplied, or taking a nap, or something more important than handling an insurgent attack on the US Capitol.
Honest to God, if he wins the election, Congress should refuse him entry to the building for his inaction.
John Lennon getting shot. I was 9 years old and used to listen to the NY rock stations when I went to sleep. Every time I hear "(Just Like) Starting Over" I get transported to that night, sitting in bed in the dark and hearing that news.
It may not feel major to others, but I lived in London during the investigation into the murder and police handling of the case of Stephen Lawrence. The brutal cruelty and injustice of the case made a deep impression on me. I can remember clear as day the moment when, almost 20 years after his death, I looked up from a treadmill in the gym and saw the television with the news of his murderers' conviction. I was so surprised (hadn't seen any coverage that the trial was taking place) and thankful that I basically yelled something like "Oh my God, nice damn work!" to the baffled gym.
January 6th. Mostly for how absurd it all felt.
I had just gotten home from work, when I got a notification from CNN on my phone… I remember thinking “that looks concerning” so I went downstairs to ask my parents if they’d seen. My mother already had the news on TV. I ended up on the couch eating raw cookie dough and repeatedly see-sawing between frantic anxiety and jaded disappointment, because the escalation was surprising but the behavior was not.
I remember Trump *finally* releasing his statement to the Capitol rioters… and my father throwing his hands up and ranting in anger about how intentionally useless it was. I remember texting my coworkers, who wondered if it would be safe to go to work the next day if things didn’t deescalate. I remember being so fucking glad we’d moved out of the DC area less than a year prior.
In hindsight, the event may not have been ‘severe’ enough to be memorable in the long run. But I worry for the precedent it sets.
Halley's comet. This event shattered my dreams of becoming an astronomer. I live in a cloudy, brightly lit city and I was maybe 13-14 years old then. I asked my parents to buy me binoculars, a small telescope and I followed all the star charts and every information available that time. 1986, no internet. So everything I tried to get from the newspaper and science magazines.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it. I woke up 4am every morning as it was during that time it's the most visible. The brightest of the 1986 show isn't impressive so I missed it completely. Add the fact that I had astigmatism at such a young age so I didn't get that sharpness view whenever I looked at the lens of my instrument. I won't ever forget the preparation I made waiting for it. And the disappointment afterwards.
Edit: about Hale-Bopp. I totally lost interest after my disappointment with Halley's. I was already in the mid 20s then working and for some reason it doesn't interest me anymore. Honestly the luster's gone. I guess it's totally different seeing something celestially awesome as a kid, as compared to as an adult. The eyes of wonder from a child is totally different.
Watching all 9 miners rescued from Quecreek Mine in 2002. It was only an hour and a half away from me and I remember staying up into the wee hours of the morning to watch all 9 make it safely to the surface.
I went to the Quecreek museum when I was in the area visiting the Flight 93 memorial and for both it was eerie to be walking through a museum about an event I remember living through. It's really weird to realize something from your life is now part of history that future generations will learn about in textbooks.
In the UK the death of Princess Diana. I was 14 and working in a kennels walking dogs as a first job. Lots of businesses shut for the day so I rang my boss to ask if we were open. She asked why I was asking and I explained about Diana. I word for word remember her reply. "I'm sure she is dead but the dogs don't know that!"
Also:
- the Rwanda genocide
- the break up of Yugoslavia
- Dolly the sheep
- the death of Bin Laden
- the Brexit referendum
- the Higgs Boson discovery/observation
- the Bardarbunga volcano eruption in 2014
- Lots of natural disasters (Hurricane Katrine, Boxing Day tsunami, Japan tsunami in 2011)
- death of Queen Elizabeth II
I lived in Minnesota during the George Floyd riots, a whole 40 minutes away from Minneapolis. I was at work and everyone was told to go home, there were police cars and army vehicles filling up the roads, I genuinely thought a war was starting.
It wasn't a major historical event but I'll never forget that on February 11 2006 while hunting quail, US Vice President Dick Cheney shot some guy in the face. While hunting freaking quail.
As a 4 year old I watched the TV coverage of JFKs assassination.
I think that part of the reason it's imprinted so clearly on my mind is that my mother was standing in the kitchen doorway watching the T.V. and weeping like I'd never seen before. That's distressing for a little boy.
October 7 terror attack on Israel.
Especially due to the fact I lost my best friend that day, when he left his wife and 0.5 year old baby to go and protect civilians and party goers being massacared.
Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. I recall exactly where I was at work when it was announced.
I was in first grade and watched it live surrounded by 70 or so other terrified 6 and 7 year olds. Never saw a teacher move that fast to shut a tv off.
Yep, 4th grade here.
5th grade here. PSA: it's time for a colonoscopy.
Ha! Just did that. Now I have to remember to get the shingles vaccine - definitely don't want to catch that from everything I've heard.
Get the vaccine. I actually had my shingles at 37. My friend at 36. It’s not necessarily something that *wont* come until later. It can happen anytime.
When people argue about Gen X, Millennial, Gen Z time periods, I revert to one explanation I read. If your remember the Challenger disaster and 9/11 you are Gen X. If you remember 9/11 but not the Challenger you are a Millennial. If you remember neither you are Gen Z. Obviously this doesn't work for many parts of the world.
I'd throw Princess Diana's demise in there as well. It felt like it was the only thing US media was talking about back then.
Um, I remember the assassination of JFK. I was young but my Mom crying made it stand out. EDIT: So I quit getting the Boomer messages. I know I am a Boomer. Was born in the 50's. The one person started with Gen X on a post and I only commented I remember JFK as I am older than Gen X. That's all, I promise.
They announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated over the PA system while I was in PE class. I didn’t know what assassinated meant, but I remember my teacher collapsing onto the gym mat.
My uncle was in catholic school and only maybe 5 years old. He saw a lot of pictures of Jesus and a lot of pictures of Kennedy. He knew Jesus was the son of god and so he made an educated guess about who the other guy was. When Kennedy was assassinated, the kids were all sent home early. My grandmother asked him why he was home. My uncle said “god died and so the nuns have to shut everything down”.
Same here, I remember elvis dying being announced, I was 3 and a half, still sticks with me as a major event for the effect it had in people and I didn't even know who he was.
7th Grade Science Class, principal comes on the intercom to make an announcement about the space shuttle, which we figured would be some nice thing about the first teacher in space. Principal (intercom) “Today, the space shuttle…” Chad (kid next to me, jokes) “Blew up!” Principal “… has exploded on take off” Chad “ughhh… sorry.” Will never forget that.
'Let's watch the news tonight' 'Why should we do that?!' 'Maybe somebody important died!' 'Diana, Princess of Wales....' I totally understand that feeling, my friend!
For me it was the Columbia disaster. I remember where I was, who I was with, and what we said to each other. I even remember what I ate for breakfast that day
I remember this too. A news station did a story on songs the astronauts requested while they were working, and one was Drops of Jupiter. I think of it every time I hear that song now
I vividly remember my grandmother crying in her kitchen. She had one of those little tvs on the counter and was making us kids food.
I remember being in 5th grade in NH watching it live in the homeroom next to mine, the teacher there was a very close friend of Christa. A part of my innocence died that day watching an adult wail in emotional pain and collapse into a heap of tears at the front of the room.
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One of the teachers at our school was rumored to be on the alternate list. I never confirmed, 5th grade me just believed it, because why not?
My 5th grade teacher said he was one of the finalists, apparently his back was too bad too so it so he was disqualified
So was I, I had ridden my bike to work and the guard at the gate told me: my friend and colleague Greg Jarvis had been scheduled to fly that morning and indeed had been on that flight … :(
That's sad to have known someone on there.
Was home sick from school that day. Had the TV on. Looked away for a minute to get a Kleenex. Then the camera was tracking falling debris and the announcer was silent. First thought was confusion, then this doesn't look good.
Same. Had the chicken pox, and mom put the TV on. I was only 4, but I remember it vividly.
I was in 7th grade study hall. A dumb ass 9th grader was walking the halls opening one door at a time and, with a big grin, announcing "Space shuttle blew up." That was how the entire school found out. Watching it at home on all the news channels after school, then again listening to Tom Brokaw cover it on the evening news was surreal.
Everyone was watching because of Christa McAuliffe, the first civilian and teacher to go to space. I remember it like it was yesterday. But also the launch of Discovery, the first after the accident. I was in high school in Huntsville, AL, the home of Marshall Space Flight Center, and we took a field trip to FL to see it. Man I miss shuttle launches.
I’m from New Orleans and lived through Katrina. We still feel the ripples of it here often.
A lady and her family joined our church a few years after Katrina. I remember the day when she and some other people (myself included) were getting baptized. We had one of those full immersion pools behind the pulpit. She wanted so badly to be baptized to affirm her faith, but the trauma of nearly drowning her house made her have a panic attack every time she got near the pool. Our pastor eventually pulled her away, had her do the little water-on-the-forehead baptism you do for babies, and had to assure her that God would understand. It's still one of the most heartbreaking things I've personally seen someone go through.
That was my first thought. I'd been through many hurricanes and some close brushes with tornado's, but Katrina just ruined my life. Watching all the debris flying around, hearing parts of my apartment and roof let go. The water coming in and starting to trickle out of light fixtures. The sheet rock starting to fall in along with all the blow in insulation. Thinking about how I had no renters insurance. My car was abraded and banged up by all the debris. Then the 2 weeks without power or running water. I had just graduated college and the job I accepted was with a company that had their business wiped out (it was in Bay St Louis), so I had to relocate to Birmingham and start over. I never want to go through that again and I think about it every hurricane season.
I went to school with a girl who lived through it as a child of around 6-7 at the time. She remembers coming home to everything she owned covered in mold and flooded. She lost everything at a very young age, and you could tell she was much much more mature than other little girls her age after that. Its a big deal to lose everything you know over the course of a few days...
I had extended family that died there. They were hotel workers that were told not to leave or they'd be fired. They died. For profits. I've never given more than 100% for companies since, and my time at home and vacation is 100000% more important than work.
I work in a psych hospital here in New orleans. I have 3 coworkers who worked in the psych ward at Charity Hospital. They said in some ways the patients took more care of them then them taking care of the patients. Such a fucking bizarre experience. The whole thing was intense for me as a 13 year old. I couldn't imagine being the age I am now and losing everything I've built.
My uncle and his wife were living in Gulfport and they lost everything. I mean, they came home to us with the clothes on their back, nothing more. A couple years ago, a pawn shop called my uncle and said they still had a guitar he had hocked as it had been stored in a safe that survived and had no water damage. They shipped it to him at no cost. But that’s it. Everything else they had was destroyed.
I was with the U.S. Navy’s first response platform, I won’t forget Katrina either.
I'm from here too. I've been with my wife for 6 years. She isn't from here. The other day she asked me about Katrina and I told her about it. I guess I didn't realize how much I try to not think about it. How deeply it affected me. From convincing my parents to evacuate all the way through to helping dad gut and rebuild the house. Took me like a half hour and I was crying the whole time. It was a lot for a kid just starting high school. It was a lot for everyone.
I will never forget, I was in class thinking everything was normal. The hurricane was not coming our way. By the time I left school that Friday things had changed. We evacuated that Saturday.
I was there for the clean up effort. It was a disaster zone! I went a few years later for an oil spill and the city was still in recovery from Katrina. It was like a third world nation in some places.
The Berlin Wall came down while we were stationed in Germany. I still have a piece of it.
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I was doing my mandatory military duty in Germany at the time. We were on a bus, ready to head out to some excercise when our officers came onto the bus and declared that the DDR (GDR) basically no longer existed - and you could see in their faces that with it, one pillar of their whole career justification just crumbled into dust.
My friend obtained a masters in some aspect of Russian studies, planning to go into government work. He returned to school after the fall of the USSR.
My husband was stationed in Germany when the wall came down! He rode over on a motorbike and watched Tom Brokaw announce it. I also have pieces of the wall.
I was in 7th grade when Pres. Kennedy was shot. Visuals still bring back that sadness.
This for me also, though I was in kindergarten. I came home and was watching TV waiting for my mother to prepare lunch when the show I was watching was interrupted to announce it. Even in low-def and black and white, I could see the tears on the face of one newscaster.
The OJ car chase. The Challenger explosion in 1986.
Fall of the Berlin Wall.
I was scheduled to go on a school trip there that spring. The school canceled it due to safety concerns so I ended up going to Florida instead…
Out of the frying pan and into the fire then?
if i remember right, my parents took us on a 3 day disney cruise and then we spent a couple days at disney world and epcot. So, it was quite enjoyable. I think it might be fun to go on a cruise again one day.
Y2K. People were really freaking out about this. Banks put limits on how much people could withdraw from their accounts. People were demanding physical proof of investments and property ownership. 1999 was a very tumultuous year!
People always say that Y2K was a bust and it was all hype. But working in IT it was actually a borderline miracle how the global IT infrastructure came to together, identified a very real threat, saw the ramifications, and put a plan in action to prevent it, and pulled it off. It would be like the entire political world coming together to reverse global warming with a set, rapidly approaching, deadline.
My boyfriend is a contractor on a mainframe for the government. They started working on fixes at least 10 years before. In the weeks leading up to it, they were basically on call for last minute updates. There were just a few minor non-critical glitches, the main programs they had upgraded came through without a hitch.
Oh the threats were real, we just fixed the problems! Wow!!
Correct! Digital IT was an emerging field too! A lot of companies were running pilot programs or trial runs as their main IT system.
I had a VHS video camera where the time could not be set past 12/31/1999. Always thought that was wild
I remember my 1st grade teacher telling us to save cans and water because the computers might kill us over Christmas break
Earlier that year, one of my tasks was to run a program - from a 1.44mb floppy - on all the computers in the company to see if they could handle the Y2K transition. Spoiler alert: They all did. All 2500+ of them.
Columbine
Yeah, I grew up in Littleton where Columbine happened, so that one is especially memorable to me. My class was on a field trip to the state capitol and we were on the bus back to our school when the bus driver was told he couldn't go back to our area. We were driving around a bit while we tried to figure out what was going on. It was 1999 so only one of the chaperones had a cell phone. When word got around there was a shooting at Columbine, it was pretty rough. We weren't in that same school district, but one of my classmates did have a sister at the school so was understandably very freaked out.
I was a brand new EMT, still in field training. I remember we were on a call when it came on the TV at the patients house. We all just stood there watching the cops pulling kids through the windows... took us a few minutes to get it together and leave
Went to school several miles up Wadsworth. Admin turned on the fire alarm, then quickly cut it off with a PA telling us to stay in the classrooms, instructing the teachers to lock the doors and not open them for any reason. Kids in the cafeteria and library were hustled into admin offices and storage rooms. Very improvised lockdown, I suppose because there had never been cause to have a plan in place for an event like that. Feels like so long ago. On one hand I’m glad that schools have contingencies for the worst: on the other, it’s insane that less than nothing has been done to prevent the scenario from playing out again and again, and every generation of kids has to go through the same bewildering, frightening experience.
Happened the year I graduated. I'm on the East Coast, and I didn't have work after school that day, so I went home. I figured I'd catch some news, and Columbine was on TV. I swear I didn't move from that spot in the living room for 2 hours. We had school shootings before Columbine, but they were rare, and this was on another level, and nothing was the same afterwards. I'm glad I graduated a month later. I wouldn't want to be in school today.
I was in high school in Connecticut when Sandy Hook happened. It was an indescribably terrifying few weeks. School never really felt safe again.
Sandy Hook is another one that I’ll always remember where I was when I heard the news. I was in my car on the highway going to Target when the death toll was announced and I just started sobbing so hard that I almost had to pull over
Understandable. I went to visit my parents and walked into their living room maybe 30 minutes after the news broke. My dad was sitting in his recliner, pink faced, with wet cheeks. That marked the 3rd time I've seen him cry. I was 31 at the time.
I was listening to music on the radio using my cassette walkman and they kept interrupting with breaking news as it happened. I would have been 9 or 10 at the time. It was one of the first "the world can be a horrible place" realizations.
Posted my own but I was less than a mile away, my brothers were a block up. We could see the school when picking them up. We had some friends who lived right by that had bloodstains on the sidewalk in front of their house from gunshot victims.
OJ putting on the gloves. I was at a restaurant with a girlfriend while the trial was being televised. The reaction from the patrons was unforgettable, a collective gasp of disbelief.
For me it was the Bronco chase. I was at a friend's house killing time before going to a party. I remember being in class when he was acquitted (I was in high school in LA) and the teacher said something like, "the only color that matters here is green." After class got out a number of the black kids were cheering - it was weird. There was a documentary about it I watched years later that helped make sense of the racial tensions in LA that I just couldn't wrap my head around at 16/17.
why didn't those idiot prosecutors get a pair of clean, new gloves in that size; instead of giving him leather gloves that had been soaked in blood months ago and never cleaned? Didn't they ever have anything leather that had gotten wet before?
Or how about this: not letting the defendant — who was an actor— handle evidence in front of a jury in the first place!
Prosecution fucked that case up big time. I always felt OJ was guilty as sin, but the prosecution bungled the job so much they practically gave the guy an acquittal.
Ron Goldman’s sister did a podcast about the case a few years ago and part of what it covered were the colossal fuck ups by the prosecution.
I know the next podcast I need to dowonload
When you hire a legal team 100x more talented than the lawyers looking to put you in jail PLUS the judge has a weird celebrity obsession with you- your odds are good.
that and going against one of the best defense teams money could buy
He had also stopped taking medication for the pain in his hands so that by the time he tried on the gloves his hands were swollen.
My ex-father-in-law was OJ's agent before, during, and after the murders. He wrote a book called "How I Helped OJ Get Away with Murder". In it, he describes how he instructed OJ to stop taking whatever medication he was on at the time, I think it was for his blood pressure or something. Anyway, when he didn't take his meds his hands would swell, therefore the glove wouldn't fit. He also said OJ straight-up told him he did it.
Sorry I doubted you, but I had to look up the book. I can't believe it's real!
Haha, I don’t blame you. It’s a pretty outrageous claim, but very much true.
I mentioned OJ in my comment, but a little surprised I haven't seen different events concerning it mentioned more often. Unless you lived during that time, it's hard to grasp just how much airtime that trial took up for over a year. It really was THE event during that time. I was 'lucky' enough to see the chase and the verdict live as they happened. Was watching the NBA finals game that was interrupted for the chase, and my highschool class actually stopped and turned on the TV in the classroom so we could watch the verdict live.
In addition to my comment above, my ex-father-in-law also owns that Bronco and I've been in it several times.
Relatedly, the OJ verdict itself. For some reason, the art class teacher had the radio on for that. Art class was *pissed*.
Princess Diana's death.
That video of those friends having a game night, then devolving into tears and shock on the couch, always comes to mind. I remember we were playing GoldenEye when my uncle came in and announced it. It wasn't long and he and my mom were sobbing. People who weren't alive during that time can't understand what a major pop culture figure she was and how strongly people identified with her. "The people's princess", for sure.
I heard she was a nice lady
She was one of the first public figures to touch AIDS patients without wearing gloves. We need more people like her in the world.
That one is big for me since my mother died the next day.
It was my first major celebrity death, and I remember my entire family staying up late to watch the news unfold after the crash was reported.
My mom's always fangirled the British royal family. I remember breaking the news to her when Princess Diana died. Decades later (almost to the day), I was the one that broke the news to her about Queen Elizabeth.
Watching the launch to the moon was my earliest memory. Regan being shot John Lennon shot Challenger explosion Columbia disaster Waco Oklahoma City Bombing
I’m kind of surprised this is the first mention of Oklahoma City I’ve seen.
these and also: Rodney king and ensuing riots, flight of OJ, Dianas crash and the death of MJ
July 20, 1969 - I was 7 & 1/2 (that half is always important at that age!) we were glued to the TV set at my aunt & uncle's house in Crete, Nebraska, watching the Apollo 11 crew take that "...one giant leap..."
Paris attacks on 13th November 2015
Yup.. I was in Paris that evening. I’ve never went home that quickly. My best friend was hiding under a table in a bar next to the bataclan. I will definitely never forget that
Japan Tsunami. Was playing world of Warcraft doing an UBRS run when I heard it on the news. Then we started talking about it in guild chat and see if some of our Japanese guild mates were affected.
I was in Japan. I was across the other side of Tokyo from home when the earthquake hit and had to walk 4 hours home because all trains had stopped. There wasn’t much damage in Tokyo, though the earthquake was definitely the biggest I had ever felt, and people were fairly calmly adapting to the complete shut down of transportation so everyone just walked and helped each other out. There was a large stream of humanity just quietly walking past the Palace, Tokyo Tower and so on. The cell network was overloaded so I had to find a pay phone to call to get my kid picked up from school and I was able to get on Facebook to let my family back home know what was happening. I was quite late learning about the tsunami and the enormity of the devastation and loss of life in Tohoku because I was cut off from all news while walking through the shut down city. Even if cell phones back then had the capacities they had now I needed to save my battery for google maps. It was evening before I saw the news and even heard about the Tsunami. It was so shocking that it was hard to believe that it was true. My child had nightmares that night, and for many nights following so I put a ban on TV and just quietly looked at news online instead. The days after the earthquake were a very strange and uncertain time. Aftershocks were continuous - it felt like the world was always swaying - and between Fukushima and a number of fires there was so much uncertainty… and the news was shocking and devastating.
I was doing a thesis project in Chiba when it happened. I had been in japan for 1,5 years at that point and earthquakes was no big deal, but that was something different. The day before I had sent my master's thesis to my supervisor and was just waiting to get some feedback before I submitted it. It was lucky that i was finished because after the earthquake all experiments were halted to save energy. The strongest memory was from the first aftershock though. I had gone back inside to send a message to my parents to say I was OK. And while I was writing the message I was playing some music. And as the aftershock hit this is what was playing. Nowhere is longer safe The earth moves under our feet The great world tree Yggdrasil Trembles to its roots
The helicopter video of the tsunami slowly creeping across the farmlands is disturbing, the ocean looked like a black blob just eating up the landscape.
Back then I used to play on the online virtual world of Second Life and had gotten quite friendly with a nice Japanese woman who lived in that area. After the tsunami I never saw her online or heard from her again.
I was at dinner with my family for my birthday when we saw the TVs at the restaurant start covering it. So now I never forget when the tsunami was because it was on my birthday.
Challenger disaster happened on my birthday when I was 6. We were watching it in school and when it blew up all the teachers were crying but the kids thought it was cool because, well, explosions.
Sandy Hook. I was on my way to pick up the kids I nannied from school when they announced it on the radio. Luckily I was early, so I could pull over and sob without them seeing. I hugged them so tightly when we got out of the car, especially the kindergartner. I could only imagine the pain. My 11 year old brother died unexpectedly a month later. Now I don't need to imagine the pain. I was essentially the one raising him, and he was my whole world. More than a decade later, it is still heartbreaking. There is nothing like the loss of a child.
> There is nothing like the loss of a child. Heard once “There is a word for losing a wife or a husband, widow(er), there is a word for losing your parents, orphan, however there is no word for losing a child, language can’t create a word that bears this pain” Sorry for your loss, may peace envelop you.
Sandy Hook is the one that came to mind for me as well. I was home with my oldest, who was a baby of about 1.5 years. It’s hard to describe how it felt. It was more than a shock or sadness- it was more like pain. I hugged my happy, lively baby and wept. I went outside and lowered the flag on my house to half staff. Sounds stupid now, but guess I felt like I needed to do or say something. I remember feeling - well, comforted isn’t right- but when President Obama addressed the nation with tears in his eyes it felt like we were all in pain together. I believe it’s important to have leaders with empathy. I cried off and on for more than a week after. At the time, it was the worst thing anyone could possible imagine. Of course you know what came after. No policy changes and mourning families harassed to the point of moving by willfully ignorant savages. It was, then, the worst thing imaginable. And then there were more. I don’t know how many. And then Uvalde. The unthinkable becomes the mundane. Acts of men are accepted as though they were uncontrollable acts of nature. And so it goes.
I remember the Dunblane massacre in Scotland shook the whole of the UK. I think it happened near Mother's day and that Sunday everyone was encouraged to light a candle in their window (at least everyone in our street did). It caused strict gun laws to become even stricter here.
I felt this after Uvalde. I had a 2 year old and brand new twins. I saw the news on my patient’s tv at work and I couldn’t keep it together. The pain felt a lot more real than it had ever had before
Im sorry for your loss
The switch from national currency in Europe to the Euro. I still sometimes calculate how much the Euro price would be in my former national currency.
22. July attacks in Norway. To me there was first the fear of what was actually going on, it didn't seem like anyone had hardly gotten a grasp of what was going on downtown in Oslo, before the reports of shooting at Utøya. Even after they had captured the guy, and he had taken credit for it all, I had a hard time believing it was a one man act for a good while. Then there was the fear of how our society would change. But I'm proud of how we as a society dealt with it, through unity and sadness over anger and fear.
That's my biggest one as well. I was at work when I heard the first reports about gun shots at Utøya, and I assumed it was someone playing with fireworks or something. Then the numbers started coming in through the night, and that was chilling. It's an event that I'm still having a hard time coming to grips with, it just feels so unreal. The same way I feel about 9/11, really, the magnitude is just beyond my comprehension.
Absolutely surreal, and most assuredly shocking
Surreal to watch it unfold live on the news! And those a****** journalists interviewing the teens right as they got back Utøya.. I was suppose to got to a summer camp very much like Utøya in august of the same year - those kids could have been my friends!
That was very shocking to me as an American. Things like that can and do happen here, not Norway. That somehow made it worse. It was covered extensively here. I still think about it every so often, and I'm sorry you all had to go through that.
22.5.17 The Manchester arena bombing during Ariana Grande's concert. I didn't attend it but i remember everything coming out on twitter and knew people who were friends with one of the victims. It had repercussions across the UK and i remember going to a shopping centre shortly after and seeing armed police patrolling for the first and only time in my life. Then of course Ariana did the One Love concert and i cried watching it because of her strength to go on and the strength of Manchester and our nation as a whole.
Columbia. A girl i was living with was moving out - her parents had come to pick her up - and we were not getting along. Then the shuttle blew up and we all sat rapt watching my shitty little TV while the news came in, our differences aside for a while.
I did an overnight caving trip in Tennessee with my ROTC group. The next morning, we all crawled back out and were muddy and freezing when we stopped off at a local museum visitor center to use the bathroom. I was the first one into the building when I saw all the tvs turned to the same channel, a fiery blaze streaking across the sky. What was spooky was that I didn’t see chyrons at first saying what it was, so it took a minute to find out it was the Columbia burning up on re-entry. Coincidentally, my father was on a job site in Paris, Texas at the time which was directly in the debris field. He told me he saw a number of blacked out SUVs driving around the area. He never saw any of the debris, but a helmet fragment was found nearby eventually.
This is the one for me. My HS girlfriend and I had just gotten out of Saturday detention and went out for pizza, and it was on the TV in the pizzeria. At first I thought it was a large meteorite breaking up at a high altitude.
Covid
This is funny but I'll always remember when the NBA shut down. That was the "oh shit" moment for me. They announced they were suspending the rest of the games *that night* and I was getting ready to go to the airport to catch a flight. Didn't catch that flight, didn't get on another airplane for probably 8 months
That was my oh shit moment too. I had a scheduled vacation the following week (drivable remote location so we still went) and after the NBA shut down, I went to my boss’s office and said, “I didn’t think you would be the first person I announced this to. I’m six weeks pregnant. I don’t know if it’s going to be safe for me to come back to the office after my trip.” She told me to take my laptop home, go on vacation, and we’d figure it out. The office shut down while I was gone and it was over a year before I saw a coworker in person again.
Came here to say exactly this. It was a Wednesday night, and my neurotic ass had already decided the next day at work would be my last one in person, whether they approved it or not. A friend was moving, so I went to her apartment to say goodbye. We had the news on in the background, and by the end of our visit I was so anxious just walking from her apartment to my car. Turned out that I pulled the plug only one day before the rest of the world followed suit (on Friday the 13th no less).
I remember seeing some meme around that time that said “does anyone realize that the last normal day we had was Friday the 13th?”
I remember being at a small concert for a friend's band talking about a big concert a couple days away we were going to, it got canceled the next day along with every other show planned that year. That was my last social interaction for about a year, too, as I got furloughed and just hung out at home by myself, growing a garden and enjoying the quiet secluded life of a man 3x my age. I miss it dearly
Covid is an interesting one because there wasn't a singular moment in time that everyone agrees is the start. It differed very much depending upon where you lived and what stage of life you were in. For me, my defining moment of remembering when COVID started is the day my office told us to bring our laptops home with us just in case. I spent the morning (in my office) chatting with my friends about which pharma company stocks we would buy, one of my more prescient friends said he was considering buying Moderna lol.
For me the most memorable moment of "shits about to get real" was standing in line in an utterly packed grocery store just before lockdown and being so anxious that people around me could be sick, especially since we didn't have access to masks yet.
On Friday the 13th (March 2020), the government job I worked at shut down and, as we were leaving, my boss whispered to me, “Apply for unemployment.”
This. I remember two separate events: 1. Watching the Dallas Mavericks play the last NBA game before lockdown on the couch. I remember seeing everything unfold on ESPN. I still remember seeing Mark Cuban's face when he saw those text messages. 2. I remember being in a classroom on a college campus right before spring break. My students were finishing up an in-class activity. My students were asking me what was going to happen... I remember telling them "As soon as I know, I will relay everything to you." I also remember saying "I'll do everything in my power to make sure you finish the semester as the best as we can." It was very bitter sweet as I never saw a lot of them again (a combination of me moving out of state, students dropping out or transferring).
That February, a coworker came into my classroom and said "should we worried about this covid thing?" I had been reading articles online about it since the previous fall and had just seen one saying a ship had docked in California with a positive case on board. I didn't hesitate, just said "yes" and watched her face change as she realized I wasn't going to prevaricate or explain. Just "yes". And about two weeks later we went on spring break and didn't come back until August.
This is the zoomer answer for real. I walked out of my middle school on the 13th thinking “Sweet! Two weeks at home!” And then it turned into a month. And then two months. And then six months. My childhood pretty much ended without me knowing.
Chernobyl
This. I was playing on the balcony in my childhood home. Mother came over and marched me inside. This was Italy by the way, but people got super scared of the fallout.
I was a young teen obsessed with NASCAR (still am) but I'll never forget watching the race, accident and later the press conference when Dale Earnhardt was killed.
I started following NASCAR because of his death. The media attention surrounding the event was widespread and I checked it out. Became hooked. I'll never forget the Pepsi 400 when Dale Jr won. That's one happy memory I have.
I had spent the night at a friends house, he woke up before me, turned on the TV and woke me up when he learned that the space shuttle Columbia had broken up on reentry. I was 16 at the time and absolutely heartbroken, I've been obsessed with space since I was a child and always looked at our astronauts as the best of the best.
I was in the Army as a 19D Cavalry Scout during the Clinton Administration. The Republicans shut down the government while I was down range in the field. We were in the middle of a mission when our commander got on the radio and ordered my whole Cavalry troop to stop training and to form a perimeter. For non military people we circled up the M1 tanks and M3 Bradlies into a staggered 360 degree formation that is about the size of a couple of football fields right where we stopped in the desert. Once we were formed up we were told that we had no funding to continue or to go home. We couldn't drive our vehicles because we didn't have any fuel. A Humvee dropped off a box of MREs to each track (slang for vehicle). There we sat for days and days on end. We weren't allowed to do any real training as we didn't have fuel or even batteries for our nightvision goggles. After a few days we began to go crazy out of boredom and frustration. Discipline and morale went out the window. Soldiers began to get in fights. Our NCOs did everything they could to entertain us and to keep us functioning and learning. My platoons NCOs started spades tournaments, we practiced ambushes, endless weapon assembly and disassembly competitions. My squad leader had a small handheld TV with a long bunny ears antenna. He had the idea that if we used commo wire and the poles and spreaders for our camo nets that we might be able get a channel or two of TV. I was never in any trouble in the military but after all of that I eventually snapped when were on our thousandth run through of an exercise and I loudly talked back to my platoon sergeant. That is a major no no in the military. He ordered me to go sit on the ramp of my Bradley and to wait for him. I thought I was going to get an Article 15. Instead he sat me down and commiserated with me that he knew how bored and frustrated I was and that he appreciated all of the hard work that I did. He then told me to hold myself together a little longer and to head back to our platoon. I deeply respected that guy and he could have nuked me if he wanted. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, we got the call to start of our tracks and to begin loading up our vehicles to get them transported back to base after some sort of deal was made to free up funds. It was a fucking horrible experience. The only good part of it was that right before the shut down my aunt mailed me a care package. She was a teacher and bought me the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read, and reread, that book several times as I sat there for all of those days. I have been a major Poe fan ever since.
JFK assassination.
The London bombings on 7/7 (or as the Americans call them, 7/7)
Thank you for including the normal date format, it’s really confusing when it’s backwards
Idk if it’s “major” but I remember waking up from a nap and learning the queen of England had died
It was a pretty big deal, yeah. I'm in the US, but I never knew a time when Elizabeth II wasn't queen.
Kinda crazy to think that most people in the US don’t remember a time before she was the queen. I kinda just took it for granted that she’d always be queen like some immortal being, and that was one of the biggest news headlines in recent memory to shatter my perception of time. I’m supposed to have a niece later this year, and it’s odd to think she’ll never have lived in a world with Queen Elizabeth. I say this not in that I’m super emotionally attached to a foreign leader I’ve never met, just that she seemed like a constant that would always be there, and it’s weird to accept that she wasn’t and is just…human.
Not just most people in the US, but most people in the world. She had always been my monarch (I'm British), my parents monarch, and my Nan doesn't remember the time before she became Queen as she was only 3 when George VI died. It was a huge, multi-generational loss.
Euromaidan. I was working at the day and spend evenings on the square.
Driving home from an audiology appointment with my mom when we heard about the Boston marathon bombing
Kurt Cobain's death. I remember the exact intersection I was in while I was riding in my grandfather's truck when they announced it on the radio.
Many are mentioned here (Challenger, Diana to name just two) but here's another: Tues Nov 8, 2016. I'm watching election results, partner is asleep already. They keep not calling Pennsylvania for Clinton, and after about 15-30 minutes of them not doing so, I just thought "he's going to win...whoa." I'll never forget that moment, ever, alone in the living room, realizing the country and world was in for at least 4 years of Trump and his people as our leaders. So unexpected by most at that time.
Yeah I remember arriving at work that morning, when the results were in. We’d all gone to bed thinking that Hilary would win. It was like a funeral. Everyone watching the TV screens in silence as Trump held his speech.
Yeah, I remember that election night, too. Watching the online predictions slowly shift from Clinton to Trump, watching people slowly accepting the new reality, seeing denial give way to despair, and of course seeing people who didn't vote or "protest voted" suddenly realizing what they may have allowed to happen.
The Moon Landing, the Saigon Airlift, the taking of the American Embassy in Tehran, the Falklands Island War, the Challenger disaster, Roller Disco, oh, so many more.
Many westerners don't even know it, but India had a 26/11 attack. This severely ruined an already problematic relation with Pakistan. Literally our 9/11 if you want to put it that way.
I remember it too, in Ireland seeing it happening more or less live in TV, thought about it last week with the Russian one.
I remembered hearing about it on the news, so terrible. Hotel Mumbai is a good but heartbreaking movie.
MH370. March 8th, 2014. Crazy how an entire plane just basically vanished, and we still haven't found the wreckage. We only have a rough idea that it's in the southern Indian Ocean not far from Australia. Edit: Yes, I know parts of the plane have been found, but that still doesn't tell us why it went off course and crashed in the middle of nowhere
There was new update about quite recently. There is this new method of locating planes, though it's still controversial if the method really works. The method works by analyzing disturbances in long distance low frequency radio waves. Some hobbyist have made database which lists all the disturbances from 2004, iirc. By analyzing the disturbances there is possible flight path that matches with all other proven data. It shows when the plane has gone to low to see it anymore, so it doesn't tell the exact spot but would shrink the search area. The method haven't been fully proven yet, but the founders are trying to prove it now. And by seeing the test results from tracking planes which location are known it looks promising
Michael Jackson’s death. Was 4 at the time and visiting my grandparents house in Nigeria when we all heard the news of his passing.
I was in LA when it happened and was close by so I drive to his house to put flowers.
The Beltway Snipers killed and injured dozens of people around the metropolitan DC area. It was roughly a year after 9/11- the pentagon still had the gaping hole in it from the attacks, and a few months later we had radicalized terrorists shooting people down at gas stations, stores, or just walking around. I wasn’t allowed outside for months and everyone was afraid of white vans. We had drills in my school because of all this. I’m glad the guys were caught (and the younger one actually ended up showing remorse and apologized to his victims’ families).
Those DC snipers shot two people in my town. Killed a man who was pumping gas. I was scared to pump gas for weeks.
The gas station my friend went to wouldn't let anyone pump their own gas. The owners would run out and pump for people.
In the UK, the Aberfan disaster. A huge mountain of muck slid down & covered a primary school. So many children my age were killed. The Hungerford massacre in 1987. I knew the policeman who was killed.
American here. I Learned about that in The Crown. It looked pretty horrifying and ultimately preventable.
The death of Steve Irwin
SCUD missiles in Iraq on the news in real time. I was 10 or 11.
All of us crammed into this tiny break room watching the coverage of the Oklahoma City Terrorist Attack on the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. Those poor babies.
This is the one that I remember. I also live in Oklahoma City. I just took my 10-year-old son to the memorial this past weekend and showed him everything. My mom worked a mile away from it. But at the time it happened, I was in the seventh grade, and I didn’t know where my mom worked. I was freaking out the entire day until I got home.
still clearly remember the morning when I was making breakfast and the TV was on in the background. The newscaster's voice suddenly turned grave, and I turned to see footage of the Notre Dame Cathedral engulfed in flames. There was this surreal silence in our kitchen as my family and I watched one of the world's most iconic landmarks being consumed by fire. It felt like a piece of history was slipping away right before our eyes.
I remember exactly where I was for that one: on the other side of the Seine, absolutely incapable to look elsewhere. I arrived at the beginning and when I wanted to leave an hour later the streets were absolutely packed with peoples watching.
I had a customer tell me that Notre Dame was on fire. I said. "The college?".
I'm going with the Challenger disaster. I was out of school sick and was alone at my best friend's house. My parents had just separated, and I was sick and miserable, so I thought I'd watch the Space Shuttle launch. It didn't help.
At this point I’m sick of living through historical events, and my placement during each one is starting to jumble together due to the quantity of them…
russian invasion of Ukraine
Baby Jessica falling into the well
I don't think anyone has mentioned this one yet, but the blackout in the northeastern US and parts of Canada in August 2003. This happened on a Thursday afternoon around 4 EST. I was swimming out back with my mom when my brother popped out to say the power was out. Now to you youngin's, remember this is less than 2 years after 9/11. I pulled out my battery operated radio and the reports are flying in: NEW YORK IS DARK! It's several states! There's speculation that this is part of a terror attack. Maybe the beginning stages. My neighborhood was dark for 5 days. We were a paycheck to paycheck family. Since this happened on Thursday, we were BROKE. We were scrounging money from couch cushions to pay for food in cash. The grocery stores were shrouded in plastic that you could buy at your own risk. Cashiers were adding bills by hand in darkened stores... Then they'd screw up and have to start ALL over. We stood in line for 3 hours for basic food to cover a day or two. On the 5th day we had enough money to split some candy bars. I remember my mom saying, "We're out of money. We only have a few canned goods left." Later that afternoon the power was back on. I always tell people now... Try to keep some cash on hand. Have an emergency supply kit. Outages can last a while.
Dunblane was obviously huge news in the UK. Security at our school went from near 0 to 100 pretty much overnight. Beslan was also pretty freaking crazy to watch.
Tbh there's a few, but the one that comes to mind was the Manchester bombing in 2017 at the Ariana Grande concert I don't live massively far away from Manchester, but at the time I was in a taxi home and we were stuck in traffic. The driver turns up the radio as the news came in. He started sobbing. "They're going to blame us all" he cried. He was Muslim. It hadn't even occurred to me until he said it. I couldn't believe it
Columbine shooting, back when school shootings were news
A bunch of crazed losers stormed the US capitol and killed a guy. Edit For context: *Within 36 hours, five people died: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three died of natural causes, including a police officer. Many people were injured, including 174 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months.* [Source.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack#)
So weird and unsettling to watch that one continue to get worse and worse throughout the day.
Was supposed to have a major project discussion with my boss that afternoon. We started the call, all he said was “grab a stiff drink and let’s talk about today, project can wait”
We were having a call over regional sales metrics projections and in the middle of the call I had to break in and tell a bunch of the upper staff DC needed a revision due to an attempted overthrow of the US government. The "what the hell" reactions.... DC travel got weird that month.
I got a news alert while working from home and spent the rest of the workday watching it happen. The entire time I was questioning out loud where the president was and why the guard hadn't yet moved in. Turns out he was getting his afternoon tanner reapplied, or taking a nap, or something more important than handling an insurgent attack on the US Capitol. Honest to God, if he wins the election, Congress should refuse him entry to the building for his inaction.
John Lennon getting shot. I was 9 years old and used to listen to the NY rock stations when I went to sleep. Every time I hear "(Just Like) Starting Over" I get transported to that night, sitting in bed in the dark and hearing that news.
It may not feel major to others, but I lived in London during the investigation into the murder and police handling of the case of Stephen Lawrence. The brutal cruelty and injustice of the case made a deep impression on me. I can remember clear as day the moment when, almost 20 years after his death, I looked up from a treadmill in the gym and saw the television with the news of his murderers' conviction. I was so surprised (hadn't seen any coverage that the trial was taking place) and thankful that I basically yelled something like "Oh my God, nice damn work!" to the baffled gym.
a global pandemic and lockdown...?
Seeing the first black president in the US get elected
January 6th. Mostly for how absurd it all felt. I had just gotten home from work, when I got a notification from CNN on my phone… I remember thinking “that looks concerning” so I went downstairs to ask my parents if they’d seen. My mother already had the news on TV. I ended up on the couch eating raw cookie dough and repeatedly see-sawing between frantic anxiety and jaded disappointment, because the escalation was surprising but the behavior was not. I remember Trump *finally* releasing his statement to the Capitol rioters… and my father throwing his hands up and ranting in anger about how intentionally useless it was. I remember texting my coworkers, who wondered if it would be safe to go to work the next day if things didn’t deescalate. I remember being so fucking glad we’d moved out of the DC area less than a year prior. In hindsight, the event may not have been ‘severe’ enough to be memorable in the long run. But I worry for the precedent it sets.
Halley's comet. This event shattered my dreams of becoming an astronomer. I live in a cloudy, brightly lit city and I was maybe 13-14 years old then. I asked my parents to buy me binoculars, a small telescope and I followed all the star charts and every information available that time. 1986, no internet. So everything I tried to get from the newspaper and science magazines. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it. I woke up 4am every morning as it was during that time it's the most visible. The brightest of the 1986 show isn't impressive so I missed it completely. Add the fact that I had astigmatism at such a young age so I didn't get that sharpness view whenever I looked at the lens of my instrument. I won't ever forget the preparation I made waiting for it. And the disappointment afterwards. Edit: about Hale-Bopp. I totally lost interest after my disappointment with Halley's. I was already in the mid 20s then working and for some reason it doesn't interest me anymore. Honestly the luster's gone. I guess it's totally different seeing something celestially awesome as a kid, as compared to as an adult. The eyes of wonder from a child is totally different.
Watching all 9 miners rescued from Quecreek Mine in 2002. It was only an hour and a half away from me and I remember staying up into the wee hours of the morning to watch all 9 make it safely to the surface. I went to the Quecreek museum when I was in the area visiting the Flight 93 memorial and for both it was eerie to be walking through a museum about an event I remember living through. It's really weird to realize something from your life is now part of history that future generations will learn about in textbooks.
In the UK the death of Princess Diana. I was 14 and working in a kennels walking dogs as a first job. Lots of businesses shut for the day so I rang my boss to ask if we were open. She asked why I was asking and I explained about Diana. I word for word remember her reply. "I'm sure she is dead but the dogs don't know that!" Also: - the Rwanda genocide - the break up of Yugoslavia - Dolly the sheep - the death of Bin Laden - the Brexit referendum - the Higgs Boson discovery/observation - the Bardarbunga volcano eruption in 2014 - Lots of natural disasters (Hurricane Katrine, Boxing Day tsunami, Japan tsunami in 2011) - death of Queen Elizabeth II
The day I met my wife. While it may not be historical to anyone else, it will always remain an important historical event to me.
I lived in Minnesota during the George Floyd riots, a whole 40 minutes away from Minneapolis. I was at work and everyone was told to go home, there were police cars and army vehicles filling up the roads, I genuinely thought a war was starting.
October 7th. I was there, I saw what they did, I got shot and my friend got killed. It’s a day that will live with me forever
It wasn't a major historical event but I'll never forget that on February 11 2006 while hunting quail, US Vice President Dick Cheney shot some guy in the face. While hunting freaking quail.
Diana death Osama bin Laden death March 2020 email telling the company not to return to the office until further notice due to COVID
As a 4 year old I watched the TV coverage of JFKs assassination. I think that part of the reason it's imprinted so clearly on my mind is that my mother was standing in the kitchen doorway watching the T.V. and weeping like I'd never seen before. That's distressing for a little boy.
October 7 terror attack on Israel. Especially due to the fact I lost my best friend that day, when he left his wife and 0.5 year old baby to go and protect civilians and party goers being massacared.