> > > With the plane crash, hundreds of people are dead. It doesn't affect me outside of an occasional thought. Callousness? No. I think it's detachment.
> >
> > I know what you mean. A couple of years ago (I forget exactly when), some wacko in northern New Hampshire finally decided it was time to go out and gun people down. He had been stockpiling weapons, ammunition, and explosives in his house for years, and for whatever reason, he started gunning people. He shot someone at first, then, I suppose realizing he had to act then or never, headed into town, targeting one specific person he had a beef about and planned to nail for a long time. He managed to kill her and others who tried to stop him, then high-tailed it back to his house, torched it, and sped away. He shot his way through a roadblock, running a cop's car off the side of the road and down a ledge (it was the only thing that saved the cop, or the guy would have shot until he killed him). The whole thing ended up with him up a forested hill by the roadside, surrounded by cops, and gunfire going both ways -- and finally a bullet nailed him.
> >
> > This kind of thing *never* happens up here in New Hampshire. Not even the more populated southern end of the state has much of this going on, but northern New Hampshire is one of those places where everybody knows nearly everybody else, and the crime rate is as low as you can get. This incident took place a few towns north of where my parents live (I live at the southern end now). My father personally knew four of the five wounded (including the cop at the roadblock) and one of the four dead. I didn't know any of them, but yes, the incident struck me the way the Texas A&M incident seems to have struck you. It's too close to home.
> >
> > Disasters happen all the time. The laws of probability and the sheer number of people in the world dictate that it must be so. We see them all over the news so often, we can't help but become jaded. And that may not even necessarily be a bad thing to a point (to a point, of course, that falls short of inhibiting us when we need to be concerned and take the responsibility to take whatever action we can to prevent these types of things from happening in the future, even if it just means doing our part to make the world a less cold, impersonal place). We can't, after all, be thrown into wild fits of agony and mourning every time *any* disaster hits, or we would have no energy or time left to function in any other capacity.
> >
> > But when these disasters hit close to home like that, it's a wake-up call. "That could have been me," we think, consciously or not. "If it happened once, it can happen again," applies to many of these situations, too. "I always thought these disasters only ever happened to other people," is invariably what the survivors say in one form or another after the fact. They assure you it isn't. These words don't mean much, because to those listening, disasters *still* only happen to "other people," because those survivors are "other people." Speaking for myself, intellectually I know that it is foolish to feel that "these things" only happen to "other people," and I would never *say* that they do. But there is a part of us -- not even our conscious emotions, either, but something more deeply rooted in us, something inextricably connected to our basic survival instincts -- that cannot be convinced that "these things" don't only happen to "other people" unless shown otherwise.
> >
> > When these things happen come to home, it upsets that part of us, because, indeed, it could have been us.
>
> Yeah Sam, I know what you mean. A few years ago an earthquake hit Assisi Italy, which is were Saint Franscis lived. When my family lived in Italy we spent two Thanksgivings there with friends, it was my favorite place in the whole country. The the Catherdarl there are all these great frescos illuistaring the life of Saint Franscis (first person to be given the Stigmamta). Both times we went we went on the tour with an American who had become a Fransiscan Monk, now after the earthquakes some of those frescos were damaged or destroyed. I hadn't been there in years, and very few people died, yet it really got to me. I know the earthquakes in Turky have killed way more people but I've never been there.
>
> Spider-noquoteappropriat-Boy

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