Mommy Blogger Admits She Didn't Know People Died on 9/11

[formergothardite]

12 minutes ago, HarleyQuinn said:

How self absorbed could you possibly be to miss something like this? Presumably her professors talked about it? I was in high school at the time and when it happened we watched the news in every class all day long.

She didn't miss it, according to the one blog post she sat there watching the towers collapse and was all confused why people were upset. It took her a whole year to figure out people died. How self absorbed does one have to be to watch something like that live and not grasp that it is a national tragedy? 

[cascarones]

I was in 8th grade and there was an announcement from our VP (ex marine) who'd clearly been crying. He asked all teachers with tvs to keep them on, because we weren't children anymore, there were no more children. That the students deserved to remember every second of the day for when they get drafted.

The mic got taken away from him pretty quickly after that and yes, the vast majority of our parents were in or had just gotten out of the military. Still, I've always wondered if it got burned in since so so many went from high school to bootcamp to deployed, again deployed.

It's tangible for me. I was in a rushed wedding seven years ago due to impending deployment and was escorted down the aisle by a guy with a prosthetic leg who'd joined up September 12th, 2001.

She is...well, I get why she's ashamed of her not knowing, but I can't possibly understand being that oblivious. The fact she keeps bringing it up year after year seems like it's a half truth she told a long time ago, got attention for, and kept building on it.

 

[Lemchop]

I used to read her blog and still follow her on Instagram (mostly for snark purposes).

This is not the only instance of her being insensitive about current events or personal situations (e.g. Amy Winehouse's death, infertility). She has a pattern of making offensive comments and then becoming extremely defensive or emotional when people call her out for it. Her favorite trope is claiming ignorance because she's a "country gal" who frequently misses news stories and pop culture references, even though her entire career is internet-based.

Her family is conservative and Christian, and she was homeschooled during high school but went to college and now sends her kids to a private school. I don't think she means any harm but she is very self absorbed and doesn't think deeply about how her words will be perceived by others. Her comments about 9/11 don't surprise me in the least.

[ViolaSebastian]

1 hour ago, CatholicLite said:

Oh my word. In New Jersey you could hear the crying out in the street in our neighborhood. If she lived in New Jersey at that time, she would have had to be completely self-absorbed. So many people we knew were affected. A friend we knew worked at the Twin Towers (he got out safe, though).

It’s my understanding that she was born in New Jersey and lived there for the first half of her childhood before moving to Georgia. Still, she must have had friends and at least a cursory interest in New Jersey, having grown up there, one should think. Apparently not. 

She also mentioned she was at University of Georgia or some small college I’d never heard of. One her claims is that she was too busy playing two sports, working, and taking a bunch of credits to notice. But every story I’ve heard about 9/11 told by someone who was on a campus is that classes were cancelled, at the very least, that day. It was also the only thing anyone could talk about, understandably. So I’m not sure I buy that excuse. 

[ViolaSebastian]

51 minutes ago, Lemchop said:

This is not the only instance of her being insensitive about current events or personal situations (e.g. Amy Winehouse's death, infertility). 

Christ on a cracker. I looked up the Amy Winehouse reference. For the uninitiated, it involves a post about landscaping. She was a photo of a dead bush and this caption: "

Now it resembles a different celebrity….I’ll give you two guesses…her drink of choice is eyeliner, tatoos and music and her name starts with AmyWinehouse.  Bless her little heart."

A few days after Winehouses's death. She claims she didn't know. Someone show this woman how to turn on CNN.

What. the. Fuck. Add "bad person" to "stupid, naive, and self-absorbed."

Quote

Didn’t know Michelle…
and not to spur a internet battle – but how come it’s okay to tease about people’s appearances when they are alive but not when they are dead? Seriously – this might be food for thought.
xo – kb

 

[Beermeet]

2 hours ago, formergothardite said:

I am trying to give a benefit of a doubt, but how does one watch towers collapse after planes crashed into them and not understand it is a big deal? I'll give her a pass for not knowing exactly what was done in the world trade centers, but she sat there watching huge buildings crash down and didn't understand why people were upset. She sat there watching the television coverage where she had to see people running in fear of their lives and sobbing and couldn't(or wouldn't) understand why people were upset. 

And now she brings it up and makes 9/11 all about her. She seems rather self-absorbed. 

Not to mention the freaking Pentagon and the crash in Pennsylvania.   I mean, is she trying to be cute?  

2 hours ago, HarleyQuinn said:

How self absorbed could you possibly be to miss something like this? Presumably her professors talked about it? I was in high school at the time and when it happened we watched the news in every class all day long.

What goes on in her brain?  

Seriously.  The entire United States stopped, we were all zombies watching, listening and mourning together.  I saw a great meme posted this last 9/12 commemorating how close we all were then compared to now.  The world was on our side and here we are now.  The effects of 9/11 are still being felt.  That was the beginning of the end.

[Somer]

Okay, I take your point (all of your points). I guess, my initial reaction here was to be a little bit shocked at seeing such hatred hurled at a stranger over the admission of her own outrageous stupidity. Seemed a bit vicious. My first reaction to the headline was “wow. That take guts to admit that.” My second was “she should have kept her mouth shut.”  I was also under the impression that this was the first and only time she had made this confession. 

Stepping back even further, I can see why people find her lack of awareness to be insulting and beyond disgraceful. When I said I could see what she was trying to get across, I meant that I am also someone who can be oblivious and completely disengaged with the outside world. Never to this extreme, but psychology is anything but straightforward and our minds can twist and deny reality in some very powerful ways. Who am I to say whether or not her mind was able to cope with bringing those facts into her conscious awareness and process them? Who am I to decide who has suffered and who hasn’t? One person's experience is neither validated nor invalidated by the experience of another person.

I have followed her blog off and on for years. I like the DIY stuff. I’m not on Instagram and I hadn’t noticed any mean spirited content. Maybe I should take a look now, I’d like to know more about this development. I don’t think one mistake is worthy of “fuck you” and “go to hell”, but a bunch of similar mistakes add up to show character and then, yeah, it’s times to re-evaluate.

[FecundFundieFundus]

A lot of people died! A LOT of people almost died, and many first responders got terribly sick from their work at ground zero. For someone who was an adult when it happened to say that they had no idea anyone died is just incomprehensible. I wasn't allowed to watch the news for weeks because they kept playing the clips of people jumping out the windows. She's just using a tragedy that affected many many families to play coy and court attention. I'd be tempted to tell her to fuck off too. Especially with the weird crocodile tears 

[ViolaSebastian]

If she mentioned it once, I’d still be like “wtf,” but mentioning it over the course of many years is making 9/11 about *her,* rather than the people and families she’s allegedly memorializing. It’s attention-seeking behavior. 

There’s no excuse for the Amy Winehouse thing. That’s just ignorant and gross no matter how I look at it  

 

[formergothardite]

53 minutes ago, Somer said:

Who am I to say whether or not her mind was able to cope with bringing those facts into her conscious awareness and process them?

If she could  sit and watch the live new coverage of the towers collapsing while her friends sit around her sobbing and all she can think is "what is the big deal?", then she has some SERIOUS issues. That is a shocking lack of empathy, compassion and just all around basic human decency. 

I remember as a child watching the Challenger explode. Yeah, my mind had a difficult time grasping what happened, but I was a child and I could understand something really bad happened. She was 18 and after watching it live on television spent a year wondering why people made such a big deal out of it. 

I'm leaning towards the reality being closer to what @cascarones, suggested, which would still make her an all around selfish person. She seems to think that this story is almost "cute" in some way. Like "oh look how ditzy I was!". 

3 hours ago, cascarones said:

The fact she keeps bringing it up year after year seems like it's a half truth she told a long time ago, got attention for, and kept building on it.

 

[Somer]

That’s fair. It certainly does come across that way. 

I do tend to be too nice and give the benefit of the doubt over and over again. I get burned a lot.

[formergothardite]

I actually could give her the benefit of a doubt if she had just once written something about how she was so busy and caught up in her own life that she didn't really know what had happened because she didn't pay attention to the news. But to sit and watch it happen while being surrounded by sobbing people and just not care? To spend a year in post 9/11 America and say "I don't get what the big deal is"?  I don't see how anyone who did that doesn't have some serious Jill Rod. level personality issues. 

 

[Don'tlikekoolaid]

My Grandpa taught me to never speak badly of the dead.  I remember him saying it really hurt them in ways we cannot imagine.  Grandpa wasn’t religious at all but he was very spiritual.

[Ozlsn]

4 hours ago, ViolaSebastian said:

Christ on a cracker. I looked up the Amy Winehouse reference. For the uninitiated, it involves a post about landscaping. She was a photo of a dead bush and this caption: "

Now it resembles a different celebrity….I’ll give you two guesses…her drink of choice is eyeliner, tatoos and music and her name starts with AmyWinehouse.  Bless her little heart."

A few days after Winehouses's death. She claims she didn't know. Someone show this woman how to turn on CNN.

What. the. Fuck. Add "bad person" to "stupid, naive, and self-absorbed."

 

Literally the only way that 'joke' makes sense is if she knew. She just didn't care. As to 'how come it's OK to snark on people's appareance only when they're alive' - for real? The only 'food for thought' I'm getting out of that is comparing a dead bush to a very recently dead celebrity is not exactly 'teasing about their appearance'. More "ha ha you're dead" - and if she can't see how that would be seen as insensitive I think she needs to step back and take a long hard look at herself.

Also to go back to the World Trade Centre attacks in particular - yeah I had no idea what was in those buildings either. The only footage I saw live was immediately after the first plane crashed, when everyone was still talking about it as an accident. And talking about evacuation of everyone in the buildings, expressing concern for the people on the plane, on the ground where debris was falling, and the people on and above the floors where the plane crashed. I finished my teabreak and went back out to work 3 minutes before the second plane crashed and we all knew it was an attack. I agree this has to be a half-arsed lie about "not knowing there were people" because if she was watching the footage they were talking about it. I can see it taking time for the concept of 'anonymous people who died' to become 'actual humans with feelings and lives who were killed' and taking time to process but even so I don't believe it took her a year to realise there were people in the buildings and planes and on the ground who were killed FFS.

[CatholicLite]

Honestly I'm just shocked. I don't want to judge this woman, because a lot of this weirdness seems to stem from her sheltered upbringing, and perhaps she's just very unobservant, but the Amy Winehouse thing does seem a bit sketchy.

[formergothardite]

She once said she was a borderline offensive person, so I'm not going to give her too much benefit of a doubt anymore. I'm getting the "does offensive things and pretends to be innocent" vibe from. 

[JMarie]

There's no comments on that Instagram post.  I wonder why....

[Glasgowghirl]

I don't believe her. I was 14 when 9/11 happened, even here in Scotland it was big news. We did not have internet or cable at the time but all channels here were covering it, radio stations had extra bulletins, it was front page in every newspaper. It was being spoke about everywhere and one of the main talking points were about how many deaths. 

[Briefly]

Now that I have read so many posts and have seen some of what she posts, I think she did know.  I just think she wants to make it all about her, as long as it gets her attention then it's ok as far as she's concerned.  The Amy Winehouse joke really makes me think that.  She's an idiot, but she knows exactly what she's doing.

[Lisafer]

6 hours ago, Somer said:

Okay, I take your point (all of your points). I guess, my initial reaction here was to be a little bit shocked at seeing such hatred hurled at a stranger over the admission of her own outrageous stupidity. Seemed a bit vicious. My first reaction to the headline was “wow. That take guts to admit that.” My second was “she should have kept her mouth shut.”  I was also under the impression that this was the first and only time she had made this confession. 

Stepping back even further, I can see why people find her lack of awareness to be insulting and beyond disgraceful. When I said I could see what she was trying to get across, I meant that I am also someone who can be oblivious and completely disengaged with the outside world. Never to this extreme, but psychology is anything but straightforward and our minds can twist and deny reality in some very powerful ways. Who am I to say whether or not her mind was able to cope with bringing those facts into her conscious awareness and process them? Who am I to decide who has suffered and who hasn’t? One person's experience is neither validated nor invalidated by the experience of another person.

I have followed her blog off and on for years. I like the DIY stuff. I’m not on Instagram and I hadn’t noticed any mean spirited content. Maybe I should take a look now, I’d like to know more about this development. I don’t think one mistake is worthy of “fuck you” and “go to hell”, but a bunch of similar mistakes add up to show character and then, yeah, it’s times to re-evaluate.

While this year's post is offensive, her post from a few years ago on 9/11 is even more crass and offensive. For her to imply that God protected her heart because it was too sensitive--while, obviously, there are people in this world who actually suffered life-shattering loss on that day--is beyond the pale. Some of the people that read her posts might have lost loved ones; imagine them reading that, and how they would feel.

I'm glad you thought about WHY this post provoked such anger in some of us. I think it was @cascarones who has what sounds like the most plausible explanation--that she said something similar once, got attention for it, and is repeating the behavior. 

[metheglyn]

8 hours ago, ViolaSebastian said:

She also mentioned she was at University of Georgia or some small college I’d never heard of. One her claims is that she was too busy playing two sports, working, and taking a bunch of credits to notice. But every story I’ve heard about 9/11 told by someone who was on a campus is that classes were cancelled, at the very least, that day. It was also the only thing anyone could talk about, understandably. So I’m not sure I buy that excuse. 

As I said earlier in the thread, I was in college near Philly on September 11. Our classes weren't cancelled, but we had TVs on in many of the classrooms that morning and we had an open forum with professors and student speakers that afternoon that got moved from inside the student union to out on the lawn due to the number of students who showed up.

Given the location of my school I had classmates with family who worked in that part of New York City and some with family at the Pentagon. Since there was also the crash in Western Pennsylvania we were concerned about ourselves as well for a while. Thankfully I don't know anyone personally who did lose family that day, but I have family who had to walk out of downtown Manhattan to Brooklyn across the bridge during the evacuation.

[precious blessing]

I was 6 years old, in first grade when it happened. I was at school and I could tell something was up because of how shaken my teachers seemed - it was alarming. We were sent home early, maybe because we were a couple hours' drive from DC (Shanksville is about 1 1/2 away from me)

I didn't see coverage until later that day, how's a six-yearold supposed to interpret "The plane crashed into the tower"? even at 6 I knew everyone wasn't in shock because a tower was destroyed, they were upset because people were in the planes and the towers.

If a small child can understand people died, why can't an 18-yearold?

I haven't read her blog, just what's been posted her, but I really believe she's just an attention-seeking Jrod type. "oooh im so sad yall im even UGLY CRYING" "god didn't want me to understand because he knew my heart would just SHATTER"

Fuck you.

 

[feministxtian]

I lived in the heart of military central and worked for a DoD contractor at the time. I remember the civilian planes lined up like a parking lot at the smaller airport near where I lived (AF1 practices touch and gos there regularly). I remember armed Marines at the doors of the office building. 

It's not something I like thinking about, it was terrifying and I was a 30-something adult at the time. 

[Beermeet]

6 hours ago, formergothardite said:

If she could  sit and watch the live new coverage of the towers collapsing while her friends sit around her sobbing and all she can think is "what is the big deal?", then she has some SERIOUS issues. That is a shocking lack of empathy, compassion and just all around basic human decency. 

I remember as a child watching the Challenger explode. Yeah, my mind had a difficult time grasping what happened, but I was a child and I could understand something really bad happened. She was 18 and after watching it live on television spent a year wondering why people made such a big deal out of it. 

I'm leaning towards the reality being closer to what @cascarones, suggested, which would still make her an all around selfish person. She seems to think that this story is almost "cute" in some way. Like "oh look how ditzy I was!". 

 

Yes!  The Challenger is a great example.  I was in 4th or 5th, it was 1985, yeah?  We all gathered at the tv in the library ( really small school) to watch.  It exploded and us kids knew what happened but looked to the adults for validation, as children do.  They shut off the program shortly after and were back to classroom.   The next day it was discussed.   So yeah, I call bs.  If we knew then, much, much younger (and the scope of the 9/11 situation was very different, to say the least) than no way.  I think she thinks she's being cute.  Is that histrionics?

[zee_four]

Kind of off topic, but how is her blog so popular? Sponsorships and the like, masses of followers... she doesn't write particularly well. The projects are things you could snag off Pinterest… I just don't get it.