Do People Over React to Bad News Reports

IS IT WRONG NOT TO GET UPSET ABOUT TRAGEDIES REPORTED ON THE NEWS?

There are people I dread being around when the evening news shows come on the TV. They are the ones who react with extreme emotivism and opinionation to every story, often to the point of not hearing the newscasters actually telling the story itself at all. The news invariably starts off with the more important global events, which can often be a report on a plane crash, earthquake or volcanic eruption. Most of the time, the first news is bad news, and tragic news and often-about people dying. I therefore get very exasperated when someone seeing the news report of a plane crash that left no survivors immediately wailing at me “Isn’t it awful about all those poor people?” The obvious answer is yes of course, though I hate the intrinsic entrapment of the question. I feel trapped into having to agree, often before having a chance to digest the information given. It often leaves me tempted to burst out laughing at the funny story and announce a wish that more people were killed. I don’t believe that for one minute of course. My desire in saying it would be to shock the emotivist out of complacency. I came home recently to be met by my Mother immediately telling me with a great air of urgency that there had been a major bomb blast in Moscow (a suicide bombing). As we live in an area of Manchester called Moston, I thought she meant it was a local event and asked in all seriousness who had been hurt, expecting to hear names of people I know. To my Mum, the strangers in Moscow were just as important to get distressed about. It reminds me of a scene in the mermaid film, Splash, where Daryl Hannah, watching TV for the first time ever, burst into tears when a man is murdered in the street. Her boyfriend rushes to see what’s upset her and sees her crying over a gunfight scene from the cowboy series Bonanza. If we were that emotional, we could never survive. Life is about knowing when to react and to what degree. Few of us are as detached and logical as the Vulcan, Spock in Star Trek, or as highly strung as Bridget Jones. Trouble is, when someone else tells me how upsetting something should be to me, I end up feeling like a monster. We are conditioned to have a certain degree of insensitivity to global tragedies. If we reacted the same to a flash flood killing 200 in India as we do to the death of a close relative, we would be emotional wreckage in a very short time indeed. We mostly register big tragic events with a twinge of despair and then a degree of detachment. Sometimes, an event will shock us enough to break through our natural barriers. 9/11 was just too big for anyone to shut out the emotional impact; similarly with the unexpected deaths of major public figures from JFK to Elvis, John Lennon, Princess Diana and Michael Jackson. When I see people react with that kind of emotion to virtually every bad news event, I actually find that my desensitisers strengthen. I start thinking they don’t care but put on a hysterical act to convince me that they do, though they may be sincere, and I might be turning into a cold-hearted cynical jaded insensitive. I hope not. Arthur Chappell