Word: numb
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...hand, the public has been so saturated with the pornography of violence and infernal visions of the underclass that there may be little disbelief left. Breslin plays to this possibility with a stylistic naturalism that renders his characters as bundles of nerve endings and flurries of reflexes. They eventually numb moral response. When, for example, a man is dis membered with a chain saw, it does not seem to be an illustration of bestiality but a demonstration of the state...
...mother figure. An evidently barren woman who has inexplicably taken Lebanon as her own country, her sole desire is to adopt a native child. Yet she evokes no more sympathy exudes no more warmth than Laschen. In fact, while Laschen becomes increasingly anesthetized by the violence she remains consistently numb...
...names on Judaism's scroll of agony, describing the events and processes in the German gulag of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Belsen and other camps where 6 million perished. Elizabeth Taylor is surprisingly muted, reading the forgotten pleas of those who tried to reach through the barbed wire to a numb world...
Second, in addition to psychologically blocking out the danger, people grow numb to the meaning of the arms race by a perverse process of "adaptation" or "habituation." As Frank puts it, "if an animal kept attending to every environmental stimulus, its capacity to sense new dangers would be swamped, therefore the animal stops attending to continuing stimuli. So do humans...
DiPietro said that during the actual rapes. "I was physically numb, I couldn't fight. I was humiliated and disgusted. I couldn't do anything." But the doctors have claimed repeatedly that" in no way did she indicate she was not a willing participant in what was going on" and that what went on was "entirely of her own volition...