I've lost my emotional callouses. I've been avoiding commercial news of any sort for at least half a year now, and had been severely curtailing any "news" input for a while before that.
Most of our time commuting has been spent listening to audio books. Before we started doing that, we used to listen to Bill O'Reilly during lunch driving. Last night we finished an audio book, and didn't have another ready for today, so when we were driving at lunch, my husband flipped on the radio to O'Reilly.
He was talking about some guy in Houston who called 911 about some burglers breaking into the house next to his, and told the 911 guy he had a shot gun and was going to stop them. The 911 guy told him not to, that no property was worth someone getting killed over. And then the guy with the shotgun said that the burglers were leaving and he was going to go stop them. And two shots fired. And the tape ended. And O'Reilly came back on saying that the two men were dead.
And I turned the radio off and started crying, and couldn't stop for several minutes.
My emotional calluses are gone. It cut me to the quick, to hear the sound of two men getting killed. I don't think this would have bothered me so much a year ago, but after so long of *not listening* to the bad stuff of humanity, I wasn't prepared for something so awful out of the blue. Burglary is not a capital crime. Those men did not deserve to die.
My husband offered to take me to the library after we were done eating, to look for another audio book, but we didn't have time. We kept the radio off.
My dislike of news has reached a new peak. I like feeling calm and peaceful most of the time. Watching bad news that does not affect me gets me all twisted up inside for no good purpose. I've always avoided horror stories and movies for the same reason- and now starting to consider "news" as horrific- except that it doesn't have warning labels for being too graphic!