Perspective matters a lot.

I've heard a bizarrely high number of relatives and friends complain that they vividly remember people cheering right after the 9/11 attacks. And the folks cheering tended to be whomever this relative thought was problematic - stupid woke college kids, scary Muslims, scary Israelis, smug neocons, bitter aging Marxists, rural yokels, California/Texas shitheads - an absolute grab bag of People I Don't Like.

Certainly, over the last 25 years, I've seen a lot of social media and partisan news advance the theory that someone was cheering after 9/11. In the same way, I've heard pundits insist people were spitting on Vietnam Veterans in airports back in the 60s/70s. Or the various Crime Wave / Drug Crisis horror stories of the 1980s that seemed to inspire every low-budget TV thriller and family drama show.

If you're not even alive as this stuff happens, it's easy to get all the wrong information from elder peers who did live through it. Or just through the increasingly distorted retellings offered up by a media more keen on selling narrative than document the recent past.