Tragic human stories that made an impression on you?

Kyriakos

Kyriakos

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I think that the economic crisis has to be reflected (or purified) in some storytelling, which no matter if on the surface is not that connected to it (for example it may have happened years ago) it does assume a role in the catharsis in this play.

Also there have been a couple of similarly melancholic threads, so i thought this might be of interest as well :)

Actually i have some to post, but i think i can find a video of one. In the early 90s Basketball was very popular in Greece (more than today) and the Greek league was not only arguably the most competitive, but also the most lucrative in Europe. Giant sums were being paid to players, and the national team was always among the favorites in the tournaments.
This is the backdrop for what happened in this video, with a player called Boban Yancovic (he was from Yugoslavia). Since it happened during a game, it was immortalised as a tv moment: (please note that it is not for the weak of heart, and i ask the mods if they deem it is too graphic to just erase it but keep the thread where other less dramatic examples can be discussed)


Link to video.

What happened was that this player reacted to being penalized with a foul-play, and rushed headlong into the steel piece below the basket, thinking (i suppose) that it would be a comedic moment. But in reality it resulted in him being paralyzed for life. I think that he died a few years ago.

It was one tragic image i saw when i was 15. Makes one think just how bad things can turn out, seemingly for no reason at all (ok he may have been losing the game, but so what? Goes to show that an ultra-competitive league in a sport can sometimes lead to tragedy)...
 
re: the basketball video: What?! What the hell! Sorry, but what an idiot...

Tragic human stories that made an impression on me.. Anything related to the holocaust. I went to Auschwitz when I was in Poland on vacation in 2004 and the place made a huge impact on me.. Just so depressing..
 
I hope it was not traumatic by itself to watch that. Should i just take it down? I meant to have some discussion where stories which by their nature are dark and gloomy and tragic, happen to cause pronounced influence on other people's lives, often serving as a guiding light, or a precursor at least to true wisdom of the world. It is not by chance, after all, that the Greek tragedies were about this cathartic quality. The horrible suffering of others can make one reflect in ways he possibly would not have been able to in most other circumstances, at least i think so.
 
warpus said:
I don't know if you should take it down, but I don't think it's at all applicable to the topic.. I mean.. it's tragic I guess, but in a "What an idiot" kind of way as opposed to a "What a tragic human story" type of way
Click to expand...

I agree, but only as to what it is on the surface. If you go deeper you may see symbolisms. For example when i saw it and was 15 i was in the middle of highschool, with a massive burden to succeed (much like the basketball stars had in the league) and at times did feel like i was hitting my head on a brick wall (which is pretty much what he did, literally). So i think that many people who saw that were influenced by it, even without realizing how exactly, or being able to put it in words.
But of course the thread is also about less symbolic influences :)
 
The murder of Sofia Rodriguez Urrutia-Shu. [wiki]Dante Arthurs[/wiki]

Basically this young girl was brutally murdered at the age of 8. The attack was so brutal that it took only 3 to 5 minutes for her to die from the attack.
 
I don't mean this as a personal insult to the guy, but when I hear (or watch videos about) stories like this, I just shrug and think "it's natural selection at work."
 
I keep hearing this story and it has made quite an impression. As the story goes, there was a wealthy guy who was very productive and made a lot of money. But there were a lot of greedy people (many of whom happened, aptly enough, to be poor), and as a result his wealth was being bled away by taxes. Slowly but surely, he was bleeding, bleeding away the freedoms that had once made his country great. It was tragic :cry:
 
The town of Joplin, Missouri, was destroyed by an F5 tornado earlier this year. My cousin, who later volunteered there, told of one incident in which, as a father and his son drove home from graduation night, the tornado sucked the boy out the sunroof. The father grabbed his arm, but it dislocated, and his son flew away. His body was fond in a pond two weeks later. Awful.:(
 
The stories that have made the most impression on me are personal ones (mostly all of one person I knew). No sob story can rival their impact, and I get a bit sneery when someone starts tearing up at nothing much. I know it's a nasty reaction of mine, so I try to avoid any more sob stories so as not to offend people for whom these stories are the equivalent of my own.
 
classical_hero said:
The murder of Sofia Rodriguez Urrutia-Shu. [wiki]Dante Arthurs[/wiki]

Basically this young girl was brutally murdered at the age of 8. The attack was so brutal that it took only 3 to 5 minutes for her to die from the attack.
Click to expand...

wow, that was pretty brutal. I admit stories like that move me (in a bad way) to really hate some human beings. It's humans like this that make me closest to feeling I could kill someone.

There was another brutal rape that really enraged me in this way. This woman was raped in every imaginable way, and her boyfriend was also raped. Her last moments of life may have been suffocating in a plastic bag inside a garbage container. I still want to kill the men responsible for this crime. They are serving life sentences I believe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Channon_Christian_and_Christopher_Newsom
 
aelf said:
I keep hearing this story and it has made quite an impression. As the story goes, there was a wealthy guy who was very productive and made a lot of money. But there were a lot of greedy people (many of whom happened, aptly enough, to be poor), and as a result his wealth was being bled away by taxes. Slowly but surely, he was bleeding, bleeding away the freedoms that had once made his country great. It was tragic :cry:
Click to expand...
I have been on the front lines of this. To actually have to explain to a victim his tax return line by line is very difficult. They are so distraught that they desire to tax cut themselves.
 
I'd say Iqbal Masih. He was a little boy in Pakistan who never knew his father and was sold into slavery by his mother early in his life. He worked in a carpet factory for years of his life until he escaped. I think he was only 10 or so when he escaped, I can't fully remember. He helped thousands of other kids. It was after he escaped, he spent the rest of his life working towards making the world aware of what was going on in Pakistan and helping other kids escape. He was killed just a few years later by a "Carpet Mafia" or that is the name I've heard his killers be attributed, so I just assumed they were hired guns working for the folks that forced kids into slavery making carpets.
 
Reading the diary of Anne Frank made me ponder the problem of evil for the first time, and probably broke my childish belief in an essentially good god. I was in eighth grade and haven't even gotten into my hyperreligious phase, but I believed that God was one mean SOB after learning that Anne died in the camps.
 
That video in the OP, is a bit sad, I understand why Warpus thinks it's just stupid, but people do irrational things like that all the time - he was in a high adrelanine, emotional theatre and the stakes were so high he let out his emotions and got punished for it. It's like when a footballer kicks a corner post.
 
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