Survey: Where were you when...

[_Jersey Girl]

Hello All,

Just a little experiment here. What do you remember about and where were you when...

1. JFK was shot?

1. The Pre-existence

I completely love the way you answered this, Bracki!

:-)

[_Res Ipsa]

I watched the Challenger explode on TV in a gathered assembly in school when I was in kindergarten.

While it doesn't have the staying power of some other news events, I think this was a "where when you when?" moment for those who lived during it.

I was at work. I noticed a whole bunch of folks in a conference room watching TV. I stuck my head in to find out what was going on. I’d had a rough morning already, so I told my secretary I was out for the day and went home. I was one of those kids who got up early to watch the Gemini and Apollo launches on TV. I snuck out of Sunday school to listen to the Apollo moon landing on the car radio. The Challenger was a real kick in the guys for me.

[_Res Ipsa]

I want to add another event.

5. The assassination attempt on Pres. Ronald Reagan.

My answer: I don't know. I recall it but don't recall details regarding where I was or what I was doing when I heard about it.

I was in Boston checking out law schools. I was at Boston College when I noticed lots of people listening to the radio. I didn’t find out what had happened until I got back to my hotel and went into the hotel bar. The TV coverage was on.

I don’t remember where I was when Lennon was shot.

[_Jersey Girl]

So I better get going on this thread because I need to tear myself away from procrastination today.

I got the idea for this thread from a video I was watching where one of the doctors (who was a student at the time) who was interning at Parkland Memorial Hospital the day JFK was shot, was being interviewed. I will try to go back and find his exact words.

In essence, he was contrasting how the nation responded to the assassination day with how we respond to other tragic events today that one would think would be life changing and pivotal--but they aren't.

If anyone was alive (probably most of us here were kids) when JFK was shot in Dallas, they would tell you that the nation seemed to stop cold. The entire population of nation was scared, in shock, and it was grieving, it was like time had stopped and the nation was completely paralyzed. We lost someone we greatly admired and depended on to lead us. When JFK was shot, it was a shot to the very gut of the country.


I see 9/11 in much the same way. The nation was crushed by it. Shock, grief, perhaps a sense of hope that we would find out who did this to us (note:us) and avenge the attack.

It seems to me that the two above events brought the nation to it's collective knees and brought us together.

Today, with the 24 hour news cycle, we are so inundated with information and constant reports of violence, that we are no longer shocked by it. We hear it, we note it and we simply go on about our day.

And, instead of uniting us, we are at odds with each other. We're polarized and indifferent to heinous acts of violence.

Does anything even faze us any more? With Trump at the so-called helm and churning out chaotic tweets and divisive statements every single day of our lives, have we been forced to shut down psychologically and emotionally?

This kind of ties in with the online hate thread that Rock started. Are we all numb, indifferent, so polarized that we don't (or can't) give a damn any more and use our devices to lash out anonymously?

What might it take to really wake us up again and unite us as a thinking, feeling, and caring people?

[/random comments]

[_Jersey Girl]

What might it take to really wake us up again and unite us as a thinking, feeling, and caring people?

Something catastrophic. Like a war.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Jersey Girl,

I think the idea that we, on any real level, were united is a bit... I don’t know what the right term would be, but it feels misguided to me. I think any two or more people can be united on an issue, but as you start to scale upward and as issues begin to accumulate our united-ness frays pretty quickly. It feels more like a facade than something real, To be honest. It has a ‘in the good old days’ feel to me, except the good old days were never really that tidy.

People talk about how things are so hateful now, but it’s kind of mystifying to me that they think that. In my world there was always low level hate happening.

Example 1: Women in our Ward would gossip, some lady would get offended, and then we’d never see her again. People would tut tut, wring their hands, talk about the incivilities we levy on one another, and then like clockwork there was some new drama to take its place.

Example 2: Fights. We kids would get in fights. Teens would get into fights. There was cussing, cursing at one another, swearing at the world, shouting matches, and just a sort of occasional verbal nastiness. Sometimes adults did it, too.

Example 3: Crime. Theft. Drug dealing. Assault. Back in the day it was common enough that at some point we’d all experience some sort of crime by the time we reached young adulthood.

So, why do people say we’re so hateful these days? I don’t see any difference.

- Doc

[_Jersey Girl]

Do with it whatever you will, Cam. That's why I put it up here.

[_Gunnar]

Hello All,

Just a little experiment here. What do you remember about and where were you when...

1. JFK was shot?
2. 9/11 happened?
3. Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened?
4. Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland happened?

I'll go first.

JFK was shot during the 2 1/2 years I was living in Denmark. I was in Sønderborg and my Danish friends, whom I was visiting at the time I learned about it from Danish TV news, were as devastated by that news as I was.

9/11 happened when I was living and working in Sacramento. I learned about it as I was getting ready to go to work, and my wife ran to me and excitedly urged me to come an look at what was happening on TV. I came just in time to see the second plane crash into one of the towers.

The Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings both happened after I moved from Sacramento to the home I live in now. I learned about them while watching the daily news report on TV.

[_DoubtingThomas]

I was living in Denmark.

How is Denmark? Were you happier?

[_EAllusion]

I found out about 9/11 walking from genetics class from a friend who I didn't regard as the most reliable source of information. He told me that one of the WTC towards had been hit by a plane and that maybe the Sears Tower had been too. I was skeptical in my head, but polite to him, promising to check it out. He was quite animated. I then walked a little bit further up to a gathering around a TV a little after the time the second tower had been hit. I watched the events around a crowd in front of that TV for hours.

Most of my attention was focused on how the crowd was reacting. The verbalized blood lust and people "explaining" what was happening to each other wrongly coming from the crowd were really scary to me - more so than what was happening on TV - which also was scary. There were a lot of boyfriends telling their girlfriends deeply violent thoughts. I was VP of the local libertarian party at the time, and had a pre-established concern about how national crises have been used to erode civil liberties. The behavior of the crowd I was around made me think about this concern a lot.

(Interestingly, I later read some academic papers on the crisis-model of civil liberties erosion that complicates this picture considerably. I know longer think quite what I did then, but it turned out to be prescient in this case anyway.)

I eventually went home - I think classes were cancelled - and met up with my roommate. He already had hung up an American flag - my American flag - off our balcony. The hyper-patriotism had already set in among everyone I knew and that's all that was talked for a couple days, at which point it started to fade. I felt a little out of touch with the mood, but it eventually settled back to where I was.

There was a politics chat I occasionally joined that I avoided until a few days after 9/11. There, the conversation was dominated by people arguing that the Bush admin was going to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq. At the time, I thought this was quite wrong - Iraq and 9/11 seemingly had absolutely nothing to do with one another and thinking that the Bush admin was looking for any flimsy pretext to invade Iraq seems presumptuous and motivated by anti-Bush bias- and was not shy about saying so. It turning out that was I was so very, very wrong about that made me rethink about how I source and consider political information.