Shuttles and what quinnclub said

[mizarchivist]

Ok. Just lost what I was typing, so this will be shorter.

I was in 5th grade, too, when The Challenger blew up. For many reasons that was much more traumatic.

I also think that I just have a hard time feeling a strong sense of loss and/or shock on these kinds of accidents. The past few years have numbed me- added callouses where there used to be none. I do feel badly for the astronauts and their families. For NASA who has to figure out what the hell happened and figure out what now.

Comments

[beowabbit]

I also think that I just have a hard time feeling a strong sense of loss and/or shock on these kinds of accidents.

I know what you mean. As I said in my own posting, I have a sense of worry about future losses, some of them less tangible, and of course sadness for the people and their families, but it's more weariness than shock.

I think highly visible disasters like this that the country focuses on (even if they kill fewer people than a poor rice harvest in Laos or an overturned bus in Kentucky) do have a lasting effect, though, in that they whittle away at our communal sense of well-being and security. And despite us having a clown who slept through cabinet meetings in the White House at the time of the Challenger disaster, I think the nation's communal sense of well-being and security was not in very bad shape then. Right now, it's pretty shaky. So I wouldn't be surprised if the long-term political and social consequences of the Columbia disaster end up being greater, just because of the timing.