Nazis, News, & Tragedies

We watched Boy in the Striped Pajamas a few nights ago. Are you kidding me? That is one of the saddest movies I have ever seen. Seriously. It is really good but really terribly sad. Taylor fell asleep like 30 minutes before it ended and I woke him up so that I could tell him what happened. I won’t ruin it, but oh.my.goodness.

I either read or heard about an article a few years ago about how our generation has witnessed the most tragedies in the U.S. during our lifetime. I don’t necessarily know if that’s true, but the article talked about how we’ve grown up with media and news constantly broadcasting things going on around us and we are growing numb to the tragedies. Some of the major historic things it mentioned were the Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine and other school shootings, 9/11, etc. We grew up hearing about these different events so now we somewhat expect something bad to happen. Especially with how plugged in our generation is to the internet, we hardly ever watch the news or know about what’s going on. That’s the price you pay when you are constantly bombarded with information…that same information starts to become irrelevant and ignored. That’s the problem marketers are facing, but now it’s our generation and the news we read or hear. The messages aren’t going through, or at least not to the extent that older generations are receiving messages. Interesting, huh?

Speaking of, a tragedy hit close to home yesterday. A girl in Memphis was murdered by her husband on Thursday night. I only met her and her husband on a college retreat Mari-Kate and I went on so I didn’t know her barely at all. MK’s sister and brother-in-law knew them well though and it was such a shock that this would happen to their friends from the college group at church. It’s unbelievably sad for Micah and her family. It reminds me how blessed I am to have the God, the husband, and the family I do. I don’t know how I could do life without them. On the other hand, it makes me sympathetic for people who have it rough. If the closest I get to tragedy like this is a girl I met one time on a retreatbeing murdered, my life is good. I am not at all saying I want my life to be bad or worse or that I want things like this to happen…but I am saying that our world is broken and people face murders, addictions, and abuse every day. This is second nature to them. Take Memphis for example – it currently is the second most violent city behind Detroit (and Memphis only lost by 2 violent crimes per 100,000 people a year). A friend of mine who worked in the ER in Memphis talked about how there were so many stabbings and violent crimes a day in that only a small fraction were reported. What a terrible life many people live. As I sit at my computer and think that Micah’s story was “close to home”, it makes me realize how un-close it really is. It puts life into perspective for me and gives me a sadness and a pain for those hurting right now whose life is like this every day. I pray that I will always hurt for the broken.