maybe I'm just too grumpy this week - Columbia crash

[dr4b]

I have no words. Happy Chinese New Year. Goodbye, Columbia. And here we were all just thinking 3 days ago about "wow, do you remember being in like 4th grade watching the Challenger explosion?"

(And of course, I do have to admit thinking, "I wonder if this time any of the passengers were CMU graduates.")

Maybe I've just grown so used to news being bad in general that I can't even really get emotionally worked up about this at all. Or maybe after becoming numb on 9/11/2001 when like 5000 people died, I can't even feel anything for 7 people dying. It's sad, I know.

(Yes, every entry in 40 on my friends page was pretty much "holy shit, the Columbia exploded.")

Comments

[chrismaverick.livejournal.com]

don't feel too bad about it. I'm a news junkie. I've watched this for the better part of the day, and yeah, sure, I feel bad. But not terrible. You're right. This isn't the same as when I was 12 years old. It kind of shocked me then. But now I just kind of feel like "another one? hmmm... that really sucks." I feel bad for the families, but like you said, until Sept 10th, 2001, if anyone had told asked me what the greatest national tragedy in my life had been, I probably would have said Challenger. But like you said, this just doesn't compare to the WTC falling. I think the difference in my mind is, as about half a dozen family members have said as they have been interviewed today "they knew the risks, and they thought it was worth it." No one considers sudden death in a fireball an established risk of working in an office building.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

It is just 7 people. Orders of magnatudes more than that dies, unreported, in traffic accidents. The people are trained to know that they are putting themselves in a dangerous situation and it's just amazing that it doesn't happen more often. I personally am more worried about what the sensationalism will do for the space program. It took it a long time to recover from the Challenger explotion and that was when it was still neat that we could go into space on a semiregular basis. The successful shuttle missions have fallen out of the news, so it's hard to know what kind of pr hit this will make.

[bk1e.livejournal.com]

Some years, more people choke on mochi in Japan while celebrating the new year. :P