Tuesdays and Thursdays for me are generally pretty quiet and I am at home all day since I don’t have class and I kind of hole myself up and work on school work. However, I always make time to watch the Ellen DeGeneres show as I find her hilarious and think the show is very entertaining. It was abruptly cut into though and a breaking news update came in from the news station. It was about the shooting on the base of Ft. Hood in Texas. Now I had been home all afternoon with the TV on, watched the local news in the morning, then Good Morning America and even surfed the web throughout the day and hadn’t heard anything about this and it happened Thursday. It wasn’t even the first broadcast of the news it was an update about the number of deaths and informing the community to stay in their houses. Now normally you can find out news from Facebook almost as if it is a play by play broadcast of it while it’s going on. I have quite a few friends on my Facebook account that are either in the military themselves, are the spouse of someone in the military or have extended family or friends in the military. I am very surprised that I haven’t seen anything on anybody’s status saying something about what was going on. I heard of the Dickinson State girls softball tragedy instantly and even saw people’s status remarking about it that aren’t even living in America. It’s crazy how only some news is picked out of it all and spread like wildfire. I am wondering if some people are just getting burned out on hearing all this bad stuff in the news all the time and are giving up on it. How do you personally pick and choose what news is important enough for you to spread the word about? How does it make it onto your Facebook page?
The gunman who was a soldier opened fire at a soldier-processing center killing 11 people, injuring 31 and then he was finally taken out and killed by the local police. There are also two other people detained that are being considered as suspects. The gunman was identified as Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan who was believed to be in his late 30’s or early 40’s.
Ft. Hood has about 40,000 troops and is home to the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division and elements of the 4th Infantry Division, as well as the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 13th Corps Support Command. It is on a base where some of the troops stationed there are currently deployed and it is all the wives, husbands and families of those gone living there and right now in fear of their lives. There are at least 25,000 people on Ft. Hood on any given day. After reading more about Ft. Hood it sounds like a great place to live and the military community there really looks after one another and wants the best. It is home to the Warrior Combat Stress Reset Program, which is designed to help soldiers overcome combat stress issues. In fact in 2009 they have reported only two suicides which is well below those at other posts. In June, Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch who is the forts commander said that he was really trying to ease the kinds of stress that soldiers faced. He pushes his soldiers to only work until 6 p.m. during the week so he can be home with his family for dinner. He also makes it that the only way you can work weekends is by special permission from him. Now that sounds like a good deal because who likes to work nights or weekends?
Annie -
ReplyDeleteI agree with you completely on a lot of this. I hadn't seen or heard a lot about the Fort Hood incident until I heard a small update on the news or int he newspaper. Otherwise I read a little about it on msn.com while checking the news. It seems that people really focus on the news that affects them or someone they know directly. Of course, I admit that I would do the same thing. I pay attention to the items that occur around our area, and the articles that interest me a lot. Sometimes that means ignoring the bigger ones, I guess.