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Great To Watch By Maggie Nelson Analysis

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Acts of violence are detrimental when regarding its effects on human emotion. When exposed to too much violence, a person’s perception on society and even themselves begins to be altered. Nevertheless, just as violence can be disadvantageous to people, it can also be seen as an advantage as it causes citizens to realize that change needs to occur. In “Great to Watch,” the author, Maggie Nelson, discusses how society, especially Americans, have become desensitized to violence. Nelson also goes into depth to explain how society has become accustomed to violence due to the fact that people are exposed to it on a daily basis. In addition, Beth Loffreda discusses and explains the effects that a violent hate crime had on the town of Laramie, Wyoming …show more content…

Gladwell also talks about how the citizens of New York City viewed the incident and eventually combatted crime. Violence does not desensitize or effect the conscience of the people it affects, but rather it becomes a daily part of their lives. When citizens are exposed to violence every day, it becomes more of a habit of their environment and normal to them. It becomes so normal that the only way to create change is for a major type of violent act, that these citizens are not used to seeing, to occur for them to realize that change needs to occur. This is what causes the citizens to overlook violence and realize that change needs to happen, not because they become desensitized or have bad …show more content…

People might become accustomed by the violence going on around them in order to keep themselves sane and not paranoid, but that does not necessarily mean that they see it as being correct. Back to the Goetz incident, the citizens in New York might have seen Goetz as a hero. Some citizens of New York City would say that Goetz had “fulfilled the secret fantasy of every New Yorker who had ever been mugged or intimidated or assaulted…” (Gladwell 150). However, there is a massive difference between committing a crime and wanting to commit a crime. On certain occasions, people want to do something they cannot. These citizens might have wanted to do what Goetz did, but deep in their conscience these New Yorkers knew it was wrong. Although these New Yorkers were living in New York during a time where it’s violence epidemic reached an all time high their conscience did not get changed or altered because of the violence. Loffreda talks about a student, she talked to in which after “seeing students cry in one of his classes as they discussed Matt’s death, he had what he called, a real breakthrough: he felt a little sick, he told [Loffreda], that he had thought things about gays that the two killers had probably been thinking about Shepard” (Loffreda 248). Although this student, whose name was not used, might have not agreed or like LGBT people, deep down in his conscience he viewed that his

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