I’m not really shocked by anything I read or see online anymore. Personally experiencing something would be different though. Imagine being a survivor of the Cho rampage at WVU. Or witnessing people jumping from the towers on 9/11. I think that’d mess me up a bit. When I was a kid living in El Salvador (in the 80s, in the midst of a civil war), someone murdered a high ranking military officer who lived next door while he was out for a walk. I didn’t witness the murder but the screams of the daughter will forever haunt me. Seeing that puddle of coagulated blood was sickening.
I’m fairly desensitized to most things. But a young woman being shot in the throat for demonstrating during the (bullshit) Iranian elections - my God. I wept. Then prayed. Then wept some more.
It’s all on the internet, if you want to see a young woman dying on camera. I couldn’t make it through the video. And I’ve watched a lot of messed-up stuff on the internet.
Marcie filing for divorce shocked me right down to the bones; nothing seemed real for quite a while.
I’m often shocked and saddened by some of the name calling and (professed?) hatred I see right here on the SDMB.
Me too…I live in North Carolina, so I’ve been following this on the news since she disappeared. I was hoping they would find her, but then the search for her turned into searching for a body, and then I heard on the news that her mother was suspected of selling her as a sex slave, and I yelled at the TV “Ohmygod that’s disgusting!!”
I’m not so shocked by horrible things that happen to adults (saddened, but not surprised), but when children get raped and murdered, I can’t deal with it.
Did you that her mother, who (allegedly) sold her into sex slavery and has also had another child taken away from her is pregnant again? I hope they take this child far, far away from her the second it’s born.
I was shocked twice this year- once when my hometown of Binghamton, NY and the word “massacre” were on CNN at the same time- wow, that was a shocker to the core. The second was when a police officer broke the news that our friend that we called about after he didn’t report to work was dead. That is the first time I’ve ever known the true definition of “reeling with shock”. It is unexplainable and one of the very worst feelings I’ve ever experienced in my life.
I was shocked by the whole Chris Benoit thing. That largely had to do with the way it just kept unfolding and unfolding, like the Playsnake centerfold in that Far Side panel. First it was his wife and son, not him, then it was him, and then every hour there was another unpleasant bit of info revealed. WWE seems to have been pretty well shocked too, seeing as they’ve sent him down the Winston Smith memory hole.
Graphic and brutal rapes still shock me and bring tears to my eyes. Not that things like date rapes, which aren’t always violent, don’t bother me, but it’s the “12 men raped a girl for 17 hours” or the one that olives linked to that stay in my mind, day after day.
Just the thought that in this world there exist men that can do such a thing to another human being and never think anything of it except “I hope I don’t get caught”…makes me want to throw up.
Generally I think of myself as cynical enough to be pretty shock free, but I recently did some pro bono work with Holocaust survivors. Mostly it involved just interviewing them to get their story down to apply for some new compensation from Germany, and the dates had to be as accurate as possible.
Anyway, this wonderful woman and her husband were sat at the table with my colleague and I - they met after the war in a DP camp. It was very sweet the way they kept correcting each others’ stories. But obviously, after 65 years, the dates can get hazy.
The lack of bitterness surprised me, but didn’t quite shock me. What totally blindsided me was when she described spending a day dragging naked emaciated bodies out of the typhus hut and carrying them to be cremated. She knew the exact day that this happened on, and when I asked her how she could be so sure, she told me that it was her 18th birthday. For some reason the thought of spending such a day in that activity left me a gibbering wreck for a few moments.
These days I don’t get shocked much. In the past I did. I was definitely shocked by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but also by more small-scale events closer to home. It didn’t have to be acts of actual violence. I was brought up in a rather sheltered way, so a lot of things came as a surprise to me as I was growing up. For instance, I remember reading this article on the violent pornography industry in 2002 for the first time, and it definitely produced unpleasant images that stayed with me for a number of days. Likewise the first (and only) time that I looked at Fred Phelp’s website and the sorts of things that Ann Coulter and Sam Harris said would really invade my mind and make me feel bad for a number of days.
Today, however, all those kinds of things just bounce off me without much effect. I’ve heard and read enough about violence and hatred to no be unpleasantly surprised by it. It’s the natural state that humans will move towards unless a specific effort is made to avoid it.
I think that the word “shock” and the concept are highly overused, especially by journalists. Every fact and statistic gets described as shocking. For example, I recently read a book which mentioned the “shocking” fact that 80% of college students think that cheating on tests is morally acceptable. That’s not shocking. It’s not even surprising. It’s the logical, predictable result of the environment that kids are raised in these days.
I’m having trouble answering the question directly, but I’m sure I’ve been shocked. But 9/11 was not a shock to me. It’s odd. It’s not like I was expecting it. But when it happened, it was so unreal that it seemed normal somehow.
I know for sure I’m not surprised that no one has mentioned anything good. Is “shocking” never a good thing anymore?
After I did an article on birth defects caused by depleted uranium…nope, nothing has shocked me since.
Maybe the Browns scoring 3 td’s in a game the other week.
I know something will manage to shock me in the future. No matter what I get used to something new will eventually show up. After a bit of time with no exposure to something it is capable of being shocking again.