Why do people still care about something that happened years ago?

And yet it still and will always effect our daily lives. Major life changing events/tragedies like that don't occur that often so they tend to stand out.

Shit you really dont see the ripples in the water when something splashes do you. 21 years is minor when it comes to injustices. Well flip open our textbooks (or whatever analog learning tech) 200 years from now and still be teaching it.

In the USA we have the 4th amendment which makes it illegal for law enforcement to just search through your records without a warrant. But the "patriot act" allowed government to violate all that in the name of safety over liberty. This program was created because of 9/11 to spy on terrorists. Edward Snowden blew the whistle on this program and explained how when he worked for the CIA he could type anyones name in a box and he could read all of their emails or could watch a live feed from their webcam at anytime he wanted and this was available to CIA members with his clearance.

They then changed the law after backlash which forced the CIA to go to fisa court and get a warrant. However it later came out that this court is useless and almost 100% of the warrants requested are given. Its used so much that Donald Trumps whole team was spied on for their entire campaign and even continued to be after he was elected president. And the program is actually unconstitutional because previous supreme court rulings have ruled it violates the 4th amendment to gather private personal records of people without a warrant. Without 9/11 the patriot act wouldnt have been approved.

People care because it changed our society. Not all of those changes were positive.

Those of us that remember prior to 9/11, and experienced 9/11 and the immediate aftermath... care because we remember how much it affected us.

I'm also old enough to remember exactly where I was and the shock of the John F Kennedy Presidential Assassination (I was in class in 2nd grade: Someone from the School office came in and told the teacher that JFK had been assassinated; our lessons for the rest of the day were canceled to talk about current events).

My next major memory was the Apollo Moon Landing in 1969.

I also have a distinct memory about 3 Mile Island in 1979. An advantage was that a number of my shipmates had exited the US Navy Nuclear Program after serving in Nuclear powered ships and they could describe what must be happening by the reported gasses that were detected. A decade of so later when they opened the Containment Building those descriptions I heard in our ship's berthing compartment lounge proved to be true - a partial meltdown.

Finally I remember the Challenger Explosion in 1986.

Nothing so major (to me) since then.

Virtually every one cares about major events that impact the world when they live through them.

You will remember and care about certain events in the future that happen while you are alive... Then you will understand.

Peace

It is what it is.

I'm still trying to figure out if you're being deliberately obtuse, or if you simply fail to grasp the concept that the world we live in now has been shaped by literally everything that came before.

You keep mentioning car crashes, so I'll go with that as an example of what I mean.

One day in 1955, an actor named James Dean set off in his Porsche to drive from LA to Salinas. He was driving like the idiot he was, smashed into a car that turned into the highway ahead of him and was killed. Dean had a huge number of fans, but boo-hoo, right? Just another car crash. Just another dead dude. Just another stupid movie star gone. Loads more of them from wherever they come from.

But what we cannot know is how our lives might be drastically different if that single event - trivial in the cosmic scheme of things - hadn't happened. For all we know, if that accident hadn't required a tow truck to be called out into the middle of nowhere, the driver might have gone home at his normal time, shagged his wife and a child might have been born who grew up to have a huge impact - for good or for evil - on your life. Or, for all you know, your grandmother might have been distraught at learning of Dean's death, your grandfather's comforting of her led from one thing to another, and the result was the birth of your mother.

Or how about trivial car-related incident - turning a car around by reversing into a side street. One particular car performing this manoeuvre directly lead to a cataclysmic war, the results of which are still being felt today. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was visiting Sarajevo in 1914, and a bunch of nationalist fuckwits decided it would be a great idea to assassinate him. Since they were incompetent fuckwits, the grenade they tossed at his car as he was driven by just bounced off. The nationalist arsewipes decided to have another go, so they set up another ambush a couple of hours later, but Ferdinand's return route had been changed and he didn't appear. So they gave up on trying to murder people for the day and went to have a coffee. Unfortunately, another fuckwit on Ferdinand's staff didn't tell his driver about this change in the route. When he was told about it they were already on the road, so the driver stopped, reversed down a side street to turn around, and came to a halt just a couple of metres away from the cafe table where the chief nationalist fuckwit just happened to be sitting (another trivial choice). Unfortunately, while the fuckwit was far too dim to even begin to grasp the possible consequences of his actions, he did know which pocket he'd left his gun in, he did know how to operate it and he wasn't a terrible shot when the target was at point-blank range. Ferdinand and his wife died, and within a few weeks, almost every European country had been drawn into war by the complex interactions of various treaties of mutual support. Just over four years later, around 20 million people were dead.

You may prefer to believe that everything is as it is because that's the way it was always meant to be - a sort of cosmic predestination - but there's far too much random shit constantly happening for that to be true, and even seemingly trivial events do have drastic, far reaching consequences.

The 9/11 attacks on the USA were deeply traumatic for many Americans and shocking to many around the world. It wasn't so much the body-count (the daily death-toll for Covid has equalled or surpassed that number for long stretches of the last couple of years, and a lot of Americans are completely blasé about that), but the brazen impunity of a group of nuts with box-cutters being able to use one iconic example of American technological superiority to obliterate another iconic example of American wealth, power and global status and murder a random bunch of nearly 3,000 Americans who were just getting on with their lives and trying to earn their daily bread.

Shadow the hedgehog is cool.

The amount of time ago that it happened makes no difference in the effect it had/has on people. It was also recent enough that many people alive remember it well and exactly where they were when they learned about it, and remember the implications very well. It had an effect on everyone who is old enough to remember it who was in the US at the time (not sure how it affected those in other countries). I was only 6 and it still sends chills down my spine.

Comparing a car accident to 9/11 is a bit of a stretch, TBH. Not that a car accident isn't a tragedy in and of itself that will deeply affect those close to the lives lost, but a terrorist attack that killed 3,000 people is a much rarer, more memorable tragedy that affected an entire country at least. Car accidents are unfortunately quite frequent and typically don't affect as many people (sad, but true; if everyone in the world were deeply affected by a single death or injury, there would never be room for happiness; plus, there's no way anyone could remember every single car accident that ever happened).

I also wouldn't say car accidents and other tragedies are completely ignored. Where I live, the public talks about local ones all the time, and also ones that make the national news such as pileups. In fact, there was a deadly pileup that happened in 2000 near where I live that is still brought up from time to time. I still remember some of the deadly ones I've driven past the scenes of, and another thing that still sends chills up my spine years later is the I-35W bridge collapse in 2007, which I watched the aftermath of from the TV at my friends' house. Same with the pedestrian bridge collapse from a few years ago, and the Miami condo collapse just this past year (which sickened me and reminded me of 9/11 in a way). The Hyatt Regency balcony collapse of 1981 is another that still gets brought up frequently here in the Midwest US, and I know people who were first responders there.

In fact, there have been three bad accidents at the intersection just outside my house in just the past year, and there has been a lot of discussion about it locally. There were people holding signs and decorating memorials just the other day.