Gun violence has become the drumbeat of our days. We say we’re shocked, but we’re really not. We say we’re in disbelief, yet we’re really not.
“A numbing is happening,” said Dr. Paul Nestadt, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “The normalization of tragedy is human nature. It’s called adaptive psychology: If we allowed these deaths to live in our head, we wouldn’t be able to live ourselves.”
Paul Slovic, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon who studies empathy and mass casualties, has made this point in the aftermath of war, genocide and the pandemic. “Our feelings are not good at quantitative assessment,” Slovic said. “As numbers increase, we become more and more insensitive.”
The progression is predictable. Out of grief comes rage, an easier emotion to carry than sorrow. It drives the rhetoric.“The deep irony,” said Scott Slovic, an English professor at the University of Idaho and son of Paul Slovic and part of his father’s research team, “is that we have this psychological armor, these insensitivities that have prevented us to be appropriately sensitive to the destruction around us.
In Half Moon Bay, they were a different community, separated perhaps by just a generation from what they dreamed for., whose lives were interwoven by their jobs, struggles and the recollections of the countries and family they had left behind.
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