Which major news events have gotten you most emotional?

Well, 9/11 obviously.

It was very upsetting when I heard that 33 minors were trapped underground in Chile about three years ago…..for 69 days !! How frightened were they ? Did they know that help was coming ? How could their parents endure the waiting ??

Then, when they were rescued and as they were brought to the surface, I realized…..

“Oh…....MINERS !! Shit, I thought they were all under 18…

9/11.

This was also pretty horrific even though it wasn’t covered by the media enough to make it a major news topic, it was just so sad.

When baby Jessica was trapped in the well for 3 days.

9/11, like most Americans. The Challenger shuttle disaster was hard also. I was out of the country at the time and I felt disconnected from my country.

The Kennedy assassinations.
MLK’s assassination.
My Lai & Kent State.
The Vietnam bugout.
When Reagan was shot.
The Chernobyl meltdown (Lund, Sweden: I came home that night, turned on the news, and discovered that I had been out bicycling all day in a cloud of Strontium 90).
The dismantling of the Berlin Wall (made it a point to be there and party with friends).
Hurricane Andrew (arrived within hours as a DMAT member, my first disaster as a nurse).
911: Watching in awe and anger as the Twin Towers disintegrated.
Hurricane Katrina (Came way too close then watched helplessly as she clobbered New Orleans).
The 2010 Haitian Earthquake (DMAT member).
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster (the Gulf of Mexico is my backyard).

When I heard that Winamp will be discontinued.

Man walking on the moon, the Cuban missile crisis, the JFK, RFK and King assassinations and Barack Obama’s election.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room Yes, definitely the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those were a scary few days, even for a kid.

@Espiritus_Corvus, I was working in NYC at the time. I recall standing in a huge crowd of people who looked as scared as I felt, watching the news unfold in scary bulletins on the old Times Tower building.

Christ, I hope that is as close as the world ever gets to that.

Kissinger, in a rare light-hearted moment, was asked to explain the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction by a young reporter. He said it was like two guys standing in a basement up to their knees in gasoline one with ten matches and the other with eleven— and the one with eleven matches thinks he’s ahead.

I cried on 9/11.

I cried tears of joy when we elected our first black president and when SCOTUS struck down DOMA.

When the space shuttle blew up, the launch one with that teacher woman on board, not the re-entry one.
I wasn’t sad or anything like that, just pissed off because they cut to a news flash right in the middle of this football game i’d been watching.

When Obama was elected in 2008, I didn’t feel any joy. I had voted for him and I was supposed to be happy, but I wasn’t.

Proposition 8 passed in California and I was gutted. I stayed up for most of the night sobbing. My older brother and I vented until our voices were hoarse. I lost so many friendships as a result of the election. I realized that I could not be friends with people whose views went against everything important to me.

I don’t think California has truly felt like home since then. It caught me completely off guard. I was so certain that there was no way that our blue state could pass such an atrocious piece of legislation.

There were certainly other news events that tugged at my heart—such as 9/11, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, and the most recent string of school shootings—but each of those incidences were far enough removed that I could at least attempt to retreat from the media. But the 2008 election was so close to home and had such a major impact on me.

I sincerely hope that nothing in my lifetime tops the World Trade Center collapse.

To this day I’ve not watched the video and find looking at the stills unbearable.

I was to the Democratic National Convention with a very special Aunt of mine in 1979 at the age of 18. Of of the things we did together was rice to the top of the Twin Towers. She was the one who called me. I didn’t have a TV channel, so I frantically drove to Walmart…who was playing The Walmart Channel. I finally bought a rabbit ears for the TV, went home and managed to get the news on. The ONLY time I ever used those rabbit ears.

What a long, trying, emotional day. As if the tragedy wasn’t enough, everything conspired to make me personally more and more distraught.

Yes, @syz, 9–11 was a terrible, terrible event. I cried too.

9/11 was a weird one for me. I mostly felt stunned, and relieved that my uncle wasn’t working in the buildings anymore. Sad and angry came later.

@muppetish I forgot about Prop 8; that was awful. That night I found a Mormon website and started IMing with an “Elder,” trying to figure out how they could possibly justify themselves in this, but of course it just made me more angry because they couldn’t justify themselves and they fucking knew it.

Columbine. I lived 10 miles from the high school at the time. Our middle school got locked down, of course. I don’t remember much except being scared and not comprehending how they could have done that.

We brought our kids up in New York and a couple of times took them to the towers on the way home from somewhere else. The ‘Windows on the World’ restaurant at the top was designed so you could sit on a little ledge and look straight down the side of the building. The view in every direction was spectacular, far better than that of the Empire State Building, which we’d also visited many times.

I worked in Florida on 9/11, and when we turned on the TV, the south tower (the one we always visited) was already gone.

Easily the most shocking, heartbreaking moment of my life….

GREAT ANSWER @wildpotato for Columbine. Talk about a weird one. Having worked with juvenile offenders, I couldn’t help feeling as bad for the boys as their victims. For the boy’s families as much as the victim’s. I totally missed the TV coverage, thank the gourd.

I read a couple of books about it, trying to make sense of it. Of course, I couldn’t, but I did gain some insight into how such a thing could happen. I can dismiss a single gunman as insane. But two, not motivated by religion or politics. It’s suicide by mass murder?

John Lennon’s murder was the first major event that mattered to me.

When Jim Henson died, I was deeply saddened and couldn’t imagine a world without him; fortunately, his legacy lives on (although Kermit just isn’t the same).

The Space Shuttle disasters upset me because I’ve always been awestruck by space exploration.

I flew out of Denver and arrived home to learn that Columbine happened. The next time I visited Colorado, the Virginia Tech killings took place within the first day of my arrival. I’m nervous to go back to CO.

The day after Barack Obama was elected, I had a young African American patient and as I was chatting with the accompanying parent it struck me how this was a the dawn of a new day for their family – they could tell their kids, “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up”. I’ve always had multicultural friends, but it wasn’t until I lived with a black man that I fully realized how different their world is.

The Supreme Court’s ruling against the one provision of DOMA affected me, too. A couple years back, my sweetie and I were out to dinner with our friends – a homosexual couple who have been together for more than a decade. At some point there was a nonchalant public display of affection between us, and it hit me that our friends were not free to share a loving gesture the way we are, despite that they had a much longer history.

I remember being kinda sad that Princess Diana died.

This thread tends to prove my theory that humans tend to bury the hurt, ignore the pain, until they’re able to cope.

Recent. “Horrendous”. But we’ve politicized it to the point where little kids dying isn’t the issue.

Kennedy’s assassination
Ohio State
Man Walking on the Moon
Apollo 13
Nixon’s Resignation
Harvey Milk/George Moscone
John Lennon’s Murder
Three Mile Island
Challenger
9/11
Obama’s Election
Fukashima

@ibstubro – I almost put a disclaimer after my first comment, because I was sure there were more…

The recent events of Aurora, Sandy Hook, and the Boston Marathon Bombing have happened so close together. If events occur while I’m at work, as Sandy Hook did, I am taking care of my patients and performing my duties. Only 9/11 interrupted my work day, and only because I worked in a hospital that was close enough to NYC and Newark Airport that we were put on emergency status.

Also, it is often the first incidence of a trauma that shocks us and stays with us the most – so those occurring earlier in our lives often hit us hardest. Columbine was the ‘meaningful’ to me because I coincidentally was in the area that morning; and VT because I coincidentally was in CO again.

I did shed tears for the kids and the teachers of Sandy Hook as I heard and read their stories. I’m moved to tears pretty easily, so I don’t use tears as a measure of significance. In my reply, I was considering what events had me in a funk or that I was compelled to keep tuning in to learn the latest about them. Some of these tragedies I choose not to follow much, because it feeds the media’s drive for sensationalism (I’ve hardly watched TV since the summer of OJ Simpson made me do disgusted by what was considered ‘newsworthy’). Also because I could be pulled back down into depression much too easily if I take on too much pain by empathizing with the victims.

Certainly natural disasters have also affected me. The tsunami, Katrina, Haitian earthquake, Japanese earthquake and tsunami, tornadoes and more tornadoes, etc. Hurricane Sandy hit my state. My local news anchors a few miles up the road watched their cars get washed out in the studio’s parking lot. A friend barely escaped her home and neighborhood as the storm surge pushed a wall of water down her street. Many people are still displaced and still fighting with the regulators trying to get their homes rebuilt. Again – so many events in close succession. It could be overwhelming if I let it.

With Fukashima and the Challenger disaster, I jumped out of my chair and stood screaming at the television, knowing that those events were being spun by people who purposely deceived us. I knew far too much about nuclear fusion and space travel to be able to hide all the anger I felt.

Yes, sir. Given the fact that an engineer at Morton Thiokol desperately tried to contact several NASA officials the night before the Challenger launch to tell them that it would certainly explode in weather that cold (but was ignored), makes this horrific “mistake” that much more difficult to live with.

The poor bastard cried, telling his wife….“Those people are going to die tomorrow morning,,,”

Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting

The stories that hit close to home make me the most emotional. Sandy Hook is one because I have a daughter that was not much older than the children who were killed. I hated to send her off to school the day after the shooting.

The recent tornadoes in Illinois is another event that has me emotional. The tornadoes hit in an area where we lived for nearly 20 years. We still have family and friends in the area and one of the tornadoes hit within a mile from my sister’s house. Every day I hear heartwarming stories of how strangers are helping those who lost everything and stories about pets that are just now being found. I’ve been full of tears for almost two weeks.