Your reaction to natural disasters / other people's grief

Post Reply New Topic

Normaly I find the desaster amaizing and interesting with nothing but amusement that people lived there in the first place. But rarely I do get cought up in the emotions.

I'll give two recent examples, both opposite reations.

I took a week holiday and was going to tear the garden appart. Cut down some trees and clean up the yard. So, in the morning I made a coffee and turned on TV to see what was happening around the world. It showed a highrise building in flame and confusion as to what had happend. There were reports that a plane had crashed into it. After being glued to the television for about half an hour, another plane came in and crashed into the second tower. This was no accident.

The emotional overload of that event destroyed me. All week I could only cry.

One Christmass I turned on the television and heard news of a Tsumani. Apparently it hit Sri Lanka pretty bad, and they showed some footage. I was instantly curious and wanted to see more.
I've searched all Youtube video footage of that event, and others. I find it fascinating. But no emotion for the people involved (other than; dick head there's a giant wave behind you, can't you hear it, or notice the people screaming nearby?).

This. When something has no direct effect on me, it doesn't bother me emotionally other than, "Gee, that must really suck." When others display sadness or grief, it makes me very uneasy because I don't know what to do or what they expect. Last year a girl I worked with committed suicide and my mom kept asking if I was all right. I said of course I was; I had barely known her, and it didn't make any sense to me to feel sad about it. I was very surprised because I'd never known anyone that that happened to before, and I knew it must have been terrible for her parents, but I didn't feel anything. My mom was more upset about it than I was, even saying, "When I found out I felt like crying," which makes no sense because she had never met the girl, never laid eyes on her, didn't even know she existed until she was told about what happened. NT emotions are always tricky to understand, especially things like communal grief.

I love natural disasters. Feels like the earth is cleansing itself. also makes people think more about life and death rather than coke vs pepsi. and everyone always says i wont be saying that if it happens where I live but I'm still praying it happens here so I can be around people when they have nothing left to be petty about and just focus on surviving. And If I died in the disaster then I wouldn't be stuck around all these annoying humans. So its a win, win, win for me.

I have never felt anything about news disasters. Just "Glad I wasn't there" and "wow" "horrible" and the time I was watching Dr. Phil and breaking news came on about the mall shooting here and I was just annoyed only because it interrupted my show I turned it off and deleted the episode from my DVR. But I still wouldn't wish them to happen anywhere.

When it comes to the recent typhoon disaster in the Philippines, I have to say I feel a bit personally involved, in part because my two best friends, a close acquaintance, and a couple of co-workers I got along with very, very well, are Filipino, and have often shared anecdotes about the Philippines (even if I've lost contact with all of them, because of my recent self-imposed social reclusion). So there's the element of concern for any of their relatives of theirs who may live in the area that was struck.

In general, natural disasters probably do not affect me as heavily as they do some other people, but here's a crazy thing for you all to consider, also related to the Haiyan typhoon: I was in my room the other day, and my aunt (I live in my aunt's house now) had company over: an older lady and her daughter, who wanted to buy some clothes that my cousin had put on an advertisement site. So my cousin and the lady's daughter go upstairs to pick out the clothes, while my aunt and the lady stay downstairs and talk. (I had sequestered myself in my bedroom, not feeling particularly sociable). Apparently, there was a news item on the typhoon, it spoke of the money that was raised for it in a charity event by Dutch radio and television. Both my aunt and the visitor spoke disapprovingly about the amount of money that had been raised for the Philippines, arguing that there are plenty of people in the Netherlands who might use help instead, and calling the fundraiser 'nonsensical'. I was kind of eating myself up in my room, and was considering to jump out and give them a little piece of my mind- but I didn't. (My argument in favour of the money raised, would be that everyone who contributed to it gave voluntarily). My aunt is not autistic, and to all appearances, neither was her guest.

Another thing that touches this topic tangentially is the oil leak in the Gulf Of Mexico in 2010. It mostly affected the ecosystems in that area, taking an unimaginable death toll among the plant and animal life; though it also affected the coastal communities of people in the area, my main concern was with the animals. But the continuous leaking of oil week after week with attempts to close it repeatedly failing, plus the governments' decision to continue looking for fossilized fuel in vulnerable ecosystems, has flicked a switch inside of me at that time. Before the oil spill of 2010 in the Gulf, I was very vocal/militant about protecting nature and endangered species, but the continued news about the Gulf of Mexico made something snap inside of me. I'm still protective of animals and plants, but when it comes for initiatives to save ecosystems and endangered species, I now think 'What's the point? It's like pushing against walls that are closing in in a pyramid movie deathtrap'.

I'm fascinated by things like earthquakes and hurricanes, but when people get caught up in them, I just feel like I want to fix everything and make everything all right again.

The power of a big storm is beautiful, no denying that. But people in pain makes me feel this kind of basic wrongness. I don't think it's really true empathy; it's more like my sense of fairness has been violated, like things are out of balance and I want to put them back in order.

I feel like I have to get better and better at everything, so I can save everyone, and I know that this is impossible, and I feel bad about it. Superman is so lucky; he doesn't have to sit and watch hurricane footage and feel helpless. He can just fly over there and save everybody. But not me. I'm lazy and not nearly smart enough. I can't do much at all, and often I don't do the things that I could do. I hate it.

I believe that most people are just conditioned to automatically pretend to feel in a certain way when bad things happen to other people. They are only reacting in a way they are supposed to. You can sometimes pick up their true feelings about other people's misfortune that they betray in their behavior etc. If they were truly concerned about other people's well-being, they wouldn't be like that.

I respond in an instinctual 'Oh no!' way to disasters on the news -- the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami was a good example of this -- but I don't let it develop into a personal/emotional obsession (I'll give to charity collections and the like, though, because that seems the only thing I can do to directly affect the situation, since I'm not a qualified aid worker or disaster relief specialist).

Oddly enough, I didn't feel the same way about the 9/11 attacks, perhaps because the way they were perceived through the media entirely consisted of planes crashing into buildings and then the buildings falling down, which seemed a bit abstracted in terms of how I perceived them as human calamities. I know that 3000 people died, but it just didn't seem that way until some time later.

As for the Madeleine McCann mania, I refused to give to any collections -- what were they going to do, buy them a new kid with the money? Also because I felt some degree of disapproval for the parents going out for dinner and leaving her unattended, which I feel they have 'got away with' to some degree. If the parents hadn't been Nice White Respectable Middle Class Heterosexuals, they would have been absolutely crucified in the popular media. So f**k 'em.

The above purely concerns my reactions to media portrayal of such misfortunes. My reactions on an interpersonal basis are completely different.