Is the world going crazy?..or is it just that we know more? Stories?

[Racer1930]

It's a fair question. I like to keep up as much as the next person and I peruse the regular news sites and also like the Daily Mail.UK (which is a good mixture of normal news but also the odd and off-beat and even terrible things.

I won't go into the specifics on some of the bad things...but we all know about the "lady" who drove her kids into the ocean (luckily they were rescued).

Personally I don't think things are any crazier than they were before...it's just that with our world-wide 24/7 news we know more. Heck when I was growing up in a small town we had a lady who poisoned her husband and an older farmer who fell down and (apparently) konked his head and was eaten by his own pigs.

Nowadays this is big news.

I will admit that I do read the stories...but I don't think that many of these things are anything new...it's just that they weren't publicized as much back then.

Anybody have a weird story from the past in their home town?

 

[gone]

Not sure that the world is any crazier, but agree that it's easier to find the stories today.

From my original home town: the police force was decimated within two months. Went from three officers to one...
First, they were trying to catch a serial arsonist. An officer from the neighboring town caught him - turned out to be one of our officers.
Then, our Chief bought a speedboat. When he took delivery he was warned not to drive it because it had the wrong drain plug (a replacement was on the way). But he couldn't resist trying it out. Popped the plug, sank, he couldn't swim.
These stories aren't really that unusual anymore, but all of this happened back in the early 1970s.

From my adopted home town (after we moved): a couple decided to quit their jobs and "invest" all of their money into scratch-off lottery tickets.
Over the summer they spent all of their savings. sold belongings and mortgaged their house to buy rolls of tickets. Spent all day scratching them off. Won back less than 10% of what they spent. Had to give up and go back to the working world.
Again not terribly weird. But it happened back in the mid-1970s.

 

[gone]

Remembered another one, from another town I lived in. Just need to say one name: Lorena Bobbitt.

 

[VaDirt]

It's a fair question. I like to keep up as much as the next person and I peruse the regular news sites and also like the Daily Mail.UK (which is a good mixture of normal news but also the odd and off-beat and even terrible things.

I won't go into the specifics on some of the bad things...but we all know about the "lady" who drove her kids into the ocean (luckily they were rescued).

Personally I don't think things are any crazier than they were before...it's just that with our world-wide 24/7 news we know more. Heck when I was growing up in a small town we had a lady who poisoned her husband and an older farmer who fell down and (apparently) konked his head and was eaten by his own pigs.

Nowadays this is big news.

I will admit that I do read the stories...but I don't think that many of these things are anything new...it's just that they weren't publicized as much back then.

Anybody have a weird story from the past in their home town?

Exactly how I feel. Just with 24/7 news, Instant gratification via the Internet, we just hear about things that we never really heard about before.

 

[Bobw]

Cable news stations are on 24/7/365. My local ABC,CBS,NBC stations used to have half hours news programs at 6 am. noon, 6 pm and 11pm. Now they have hour, 2 hour programs and are on at 10, leading into the 11 o'clock news.They need to fill the time. Stupid, nonsensical crap gets air time just like legit news.

 

[gone]

My local stations do that too. But for every 5 minutes of news they show 7 minutes of commercials!
Most of their "news" are actually yesterday's stories they copied from national feeds.

 

[KevinWI]

Cable news stations are on 24/7/365. My local ABC,CBS,NBC stations used to have half hours news programs at 6 am. noon, 6 pm and 11pm. Now they have hour, 2 hour programs and are on at 10, leading into the 11 o'clock news.They need to fill the time. Stupid, nonsensical crap gets air time just like legit news.

I hate to agree with Andy on anything and sound like a Twitter hipster, and I'm sure some of you will want to shoot me, but for pure news, Al Jazeera America isn't bad. They cover just the news, no entertainment stories, no human interest stories, no "outrage" stories about some local teacher telling kids about evolution (Fox News) or what some state senator said about abortion (MSNBC).

 

[Benevolent One]

That's a pretty good question. We had some pretty strange people and incidents in my hometown. We had a woman who dressed up as a nun who lived down the street from me. She wasn't a nun. She was divorced with a teenage daughter who was one of the loosest girls around. We had a guy who dressed in all purple, his house, car and pretty much everything in his yard was purple. Both of these people were probably certifiable to varying degrees, but people just left them alone mostly. Today, particularly the fake nun, would have been harassed terribly. Back then, we just kind of figured they weren't bothering anybody, why would we bother them.

We have heard some horrific stories of child abuse over the last few years and those do seem to be getting worse, but we also know that there was an awful lot of that that went on years ago that just went unreported because kids didn't have the resources to feel safe reporting them. Rape is still an extremely underreported crime, but the amount of victims who have been willing to come forward and society's growth in not blaming the victim has led to more rapes being reported than ever. Also, the internet has made it easier for victims and police to find rapists as well.

In summation, I think it is a combination of things. Many things that were never reported are being reported, but society is definitely declining morally and humanely.