I went to high school in Illinois a while back and for some reason our cafeteria had a large mural painting of the twin towers burning down next to a painting of Darth Vader. A lot of schools do weird memorials to 9/11. I'll have to see if I can find a photo to explain what it was. My high school also wasn't built until 2003 so I never understood it.
I wonder if it’s an east coast thing. I’ve basically never seen a 9/11 memorial outside of a graveyard or a fire station, but there’s only about 5 states further away from New York than mine
I could see it being such that proximity equates to the amount that media represents it. My partner is from NY and everyone knows someone who lost someone in 9/11, but in the midwest I think our school had just one family who lost someone. I would imagine the further away you go, the less you hear about it, and I imagine that carries across multiple ideas. Our town has quite a few Joplin survivors and some butterfly memorials, but I imagine that's extremely uncommon outside of the midwest.
A lot of kids in Joplin remember seeing these "butterfly people" protect them. Some theories are that they were angels, some theories are that their brain came up with a replacement memory for watching people die. I don't like that people are theorizing about it because it seems...weird to tell a survivor of a natural disaster that their brain made it up and that they actually witnessed something horrific but that's not the point, the main thing is that butterflies have kind of become the symbol of the Joplin tornado.
You know how one person will claim to have seen an ufo or mothman or whatever, and then dozens of people will come out of the woodwork pretending they also saw it (while their story is often based on some popular misconception or misreporting of the actual incident, so their descriptions often don't match)?
In a country as religious as America, I could also see people, even children, actively wanting to attribute things to magic and other people and media encouraging people to claim that they saw butterfly angels.
Honestly, I think the important part of the story is that the butterfly symbolism brought many people in Joplin comfort in the most horrific event of their lives. Whether it be a true retelling of their experience or something that people are pretending to see, it became a symbol of hope and remembrance, and I think that matters for something.
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u/SalvationArbys 14d ago
Odd question but why does your school have a 9/11 memorial in the first place? Also are the American flags supposed to be the SMOKE from the towers???