I’m just going to add something no one has mentioned yet
Things that I can remember bringing a spontaneous tear to my eye seeing them on TV:
The Boxing Day Tsunami (I can’t believe no one has mentioned it yet, it killed 230,000! Maybe it’s more in the minds of Europeans as so many of us take ‘winter sun’ holidays in that part of the world).
Diana’s death, which surprised me, but boy, that funeral was emotional.
9/11, just so shocking.
The earliest one I remember making me cry was the Hillsborough Disaster, as I watched it unfold on the screen in front of me.
I have to say, Michael Jackson’s death was really nothing to me. He just seemed like another pop star on borrowed time anyway.
I have to add: the Ecole Polytechnique massacre.
6 PM at the RSL club.
In chronological order:
Challenger
Hungerford
Hillsborough
Lockerbie
Dunblane
The Bam earthquake
9/11
Shock and Awe
The Tsunami
JFK assassination
RJK assassination
Munich Olympics
Kent State
Various genocides/ethnic cleansing (Sudan, Rwanda, etc.)
Christmas Tsunami
Death of Diana
Ted Williams corpse fiasco
Oklahoma City
Challenger
Columbia
9/11
Start of Iraq War
Dan Rather’s firing
Moving of Jets and Nordiques
Demolition of Tiger Stadium
Demolition of Yankee Stadium
Death of Ernie Harwell
JFK, Jr’s death. Although he was a decade older than me, he felt like my generation’s Kennedy. When he died, it felt like the end of an era, somehow.
2004 Tsunami
Space Shuttle’s Challenger and Columbia – saw the Challenger explosion in school, was living in Texas where Columbia broke up
Shock and Awe – I was watching on TV in a waiting room, people were cheering and that upset me almost as much as what I was seeing on TV
OKC bombing
Princess Di’s death
9/11
some events didn’t have direct effects because you weren’t in the event but might have indirect effects.
9/11 has changed a lot of government behavior, policies and actions that will affect all in the USA for decades.
i’ve heard in debates that the OJ acquittal set race relations back a decade.
I don’t understand. How are Han Chinese being forced into Tibet, and how is it their genocide?
In retrospect, Charles and Diana’s wedding. How could anyone have predicted the way the whole thing played out?
Also in retrospect, the murder of Selena.
And that whole mess back in 1992 saddened me quite a lot at the time.
Both space shuttle explosions. (My school was watching the Challenger launch on television. I was the first person to tell my mother about it.)
Princess Diana’s death. This is especially odd because I really didn’t care about her while she was alive, but after the car crash I was fascinated.
9/11
The Gulf Oil spill.
The Omagh Bombing
9/11
The Death of Ronnie Drew
The Iraq Invasion
The death of Dale Earnhardt. All lot of other things such a 9/11 and the space shuttle disaster made me sad, Dale’s death was like a kick with a steel toed boot to the stomach.
What makes me even sadder are a handful of companies that are still trying to make a buck off his name.