First piece of news you remember

[yayfulness]

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/90139/ because I'm too lazy to format a fancy link

I was born in 1990. The first piece of news I remember having some sort of exposure to was the Clinton vs. Dole election in 1996. The first pieces of news I distinctly remember reading or hearing about from the media (rather than my parents) were the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the murder of Matthew Shepard (although I didn't appreciate its significance at the time), both in 1998.

[Genuine Article]

I was born in '87, so mine's the Waco siege in '93, followed by the whole OJ Simpson thing in '94.

[Shrinky Dink]

The first specific thing would probably be 9/11 for me.However, before that I remember hearing a whole bunch of stuff about the Catholic church and birth control which led to me asking my mom, "Mom, do we believe in birth control?" and receiving a curt,"Yes." in response. To be fair, I was in 2nd grade and didn't even know what sex was yet.

My mom stopped listening to news radio about the same time because I heard a word on that I didn't understand so I asked, "Mom, what's rape?"

[Cindy]

The first one I remember is the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986. (Obviously, I'm a bit older than most of y'all.)

Shrinky Dink's story reminded me of the time (probably about fourth grade) when I asked my mom what abortion was. She wouldn't answer me, but told me to look it up for myself in the dictionary. I looked in the dictionary, and it defined abortion as the termination of a fetus. I didn't know what fetus meant either, so I looked that up too, and saw that a fetus is apparently a developing embryo. I looked up "embryo," didn't know the key words that would have told me what an embryo was either, and finally just gave up on figuring out what on earth people were getting so riled up about. And that's when I learned that dictionaries are of very limited usefulness if you don't know anything about a particular subject.

[Cindy]

On second thought, I kind of have an earlier memory. When I was 2 or 3 years old and living in Tucson, I had a really vivid nightmare about being kidnapped by a man who took me to his house, chopped me into pieces, and placed all of the pieces in labeled drawers that already had the pieces of several other children in them. It was a disturbing and vivid enough memory that I've always remembered it, but I didn't realize that it might be connected to anything in reality until a few years ago when my older sister mentioned something about being afraid to walk home from school when we lived in Tucson because there'd been a 7-year old girl who'd been grabbed off the street and murdered, and there was tons of sensational news coverage about it for months afterwards, while the killer remained at large. So, I don't have a memory of the event itself, but I have a memory of a nightmare that I'm pretty sure was triggered by that news.

[Cognoscente]

Born in '84. Operation Desert Storm began on January 17, 1991. My family was stationed in İncirlik AFB in Turkey, and my first substantial "news" memory is being evacuated and airlifted in the middle of the night on January 15th. I have no memory of the '88 election, but I remember the '92 one quite well.

[Emiliana]

I have vague memories of the 92 election (I was in kindergarten). I remember the Oklahoma City bombing in 95 well, though. At first I was just grumpy because Animaniacs was interrupted by a news bulletin, but then a few days later I saw in the headline of the newspaper that over a hundred people had died. I remember thinking that for each of those hundred people, there was a family feeling just as sad as my family had about my mom's death (six months previously).

[Emiliana]

Shrinky Dink's story reminded me of the time (probably about fourth grade) when I asked my mom what abortion was. She wouldn't answer me, but told me to look it up for myself in the dictionary. I looked in the dictionary, and it defined abortion as the termination of a fetus. I didn't know what fetus meant either, so I looked that up too, and saw that a fetus is apparently a developing embryo. I looked up "embryo," didn't know the key words that would have told me what an embryo was either, and finally just gave up on figuring out what on earth people were getting so riled up about. And that's when I learned that dictionaries are of very limited usefulness if you don't know anything about a particular subject.