First of all goat felcher, there were seven astronauts. Redo your math.
Secondly, were you raised some kind of sociopathic devil spawn yourself. Of course kids can feel empathy unless you are talking about 4 month olf babies and I don’t think you are. Are you saying that you would have shrugged you shoulders and gone off for some ice cream if you just watched your parents die?
Wait. Don’t answer that. It sounds like you probably would have. However, the other 99.9% of us that weren’t born psychopaths felt real grief at a very young age and it does make it more tragic.
Your post really and truly scares me and disgusts me more than anything that I have read on this board and shows horrible psychological perversion and ignorance. I hope you get some help or keep yourself in a place where you can’t hurt others.
I don’t care for the news-mongers at all. They are selling air time and that’s all. Most news on the air isn’t really news. They are like jackals or buzzards waiting for an animal to get weak enough for them to finally go in and grab a bite all too often.
When my daughter drowned a local news channel got in the door and interviewed her. It was a long interview but the aired only a few seconds of it. I don’t have a problem with that, it’s the few seconds they chose. In a time like this you can go from incapacitating grief to totally numb. So numb you can even smile. It’s called shock. They chose her smiling. I’ve noticed that other people in disasters or loss often get the same treatment. Screw the newscasters!
That said, those people lost on Columbia were doing a heroic job. A job that has potential to help our whole planet perhaps. They knew what they were doing, yes, but their loss is bigger than just their death. We all lost something.
The OP! If you were talking not just about the news but about the grief, I disagree with you strongly. I feel for their families, they have kids, spouse’s, siblings, parents and friends. Sadly the astronauts’ pain is over, their futures are gone. Everyone else’s pain will take a long time to deal with. For some it will never go away or even diminish. Show some compassion
Infectious Lass - Are you seriously saying that most children don’t feel grief with the loss of a parent!? Or that it goes away from them in a short period of time? That is one of the most assinine things I’ve ever read. If you were that emotinally empty when you were a child, then I feel sorry for you. But that is not how most children are.
When I was 3 I found my fathers body, I got over it much faster than an older person although even aas old as 12-13 I thought I saw his fac on other men. My son was there when his sister drowned, he had to watch it and he couldn’t do anything about it. He was 7, he’s now 8. He’s sad about it but the effects on him are nothing like how his mother and I feel. Sometimes you simply can’t function.
So, yes younger children handle it better and I agree with Infectious Lass as far as that goes. Once they get older though…
it’s a whole different ballgame.
I haven’t foisted this off on you folks recently, so I’ll chip in with my response to a similar OP on the AOL/SDMB about five years ago. That OP was also upset about the amount of grief expressed by so many people over a stranger, (in that case a celebrity).
Substitute the general admiration toward astronauts for “celebrity” and I suspect that you get the same general result. lucwarm posted a thread in Great Debates a couple of days ago wondering about our reaction to the Columbia vs our reaction to deaths in helicopter training accidents. I think his point and the responses tend to follow the same basic ideas expressed, here.
…that I have had ENOUGH of shallow media whores taking advantage of the deaths of seven people! How DARE Ted Kennedy use this tragedy to get his fat face on TV! Nobody seems to have grasped my message…that the news media has turned this tragedy into the equivilent of so much garbage-I cannot turn on the TV and not see the thing endlessly repeated. I am saying: show some respect for the families, and end this insane meadi “grief fest”…lets face it, 6 months from now just about NOBODY will remember any of these people’s names!
Point well taken. I wasn’t sure what you were saying, that’s why my first reply to the OP was from 2 angles.
News media Circus, brought to you by the clowns. Give them some piece, some room.
Oddly though, I’ve found that some part of the grieving process is the desperate need to tell the story of the dead. The need to yell at the top of your lungs, loud enough so the world takes notice and says “What a loss! They will be missed.”
I’m knee-jeking a reaction to the first part of this, and I apologize if it repeats what someone else covered in between the quoted post and mine.
On September 11, 2001 the world changed. Not just NYC, not just the United States. The whole world. On a business level, on a military level, and on a political level. Thousands of people lost loved ones, friends, colleagues, and in some cases, heroes. The way we run our day to day lives was changed. Petty prejudices turned into overt suspicions and mistrust. Routine tasks like flying from one place to another turned into tedious ordeals. The most innocuous incidents were hashed over for evidence of terrorist connections.
Events like this, for better or worse, are newsworthy for far more than two or three days. To this day, 18 months after the WTC fell, I still read articles and watch news stories and documentaries about it. We watched the news for days straight at work. People tuned their radios to hear any news conferences about it. Why? Because it effected everything we did, and the way we did it.
Stories like 9-11, Challenger, Columbia, Princess Diana, etc. are the things our children will be reading about in their history books in the years to come. I, for one, would love for my son to go into class with a better understanding about what happened and why because his parents were responsible, intelligent people who watched the news, read the articles, and were able to give informed answers and explanations. I do not want him to say, “Uh, my dad got sick of all the coverage and watched sitcoms instead”
Thanks for being civil but in case it wasn’t painfully clear, my post was just a satirized version of the OP. I tried to make it sound as unsophisticated and degenerate as possible to make that clear but apparently enough people know someone that would actually hold an opinion like this that it made people wonder.
Just so it’s really clear—I’ll bet my fabulous G4 PowerMac that Shagnasty was dripping with sarcasm. DRIPPING with it. It was very obvious to me.
I’ll add a bit of my own: I was very put out when those celebrities did their fundraising program a few days after 9/11. That damned show was on EVERY cable station. They preempted Farscape to show it! I mean, where are their priorities?!?
