Picture this: you’re walking through G-Square during lunch, minding your own business, listening to Kendrick’s “Not Like Us” diss on Drake. Next thing you know, right hooks are thrown and you are dropped into an imaginary ring as someone who you passed in the hallways without saying hello to in the morning, just starts swinging at you. But never fear, because everybody you know owns a phone and surely someone is going to call 911. Right?
No. Instead, everybody crowding around is only taking a video, and sometimes even encouraging the fight, so that they can circulate it all over Instagram.
The 911 landline was first available in 1968 and the first portable phone has been around since 1973. How can something that’s constantly taught be overlooked during such a situation where 911 is warranted?
These fights are all over X, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Youtube. Students are getting beaten up to the point of hospitalization yet all we hear in the videos are a collection of “Ooh’s” and “That’s got to hurt.”
While it is understandable that kids are going to be more hesitant in tackling the offender to the ground, adults put in that same situation have proven to be just as useless. Across videos, all they can be heard saying is “Honey, honey, please calm down.” Even if one isn’t going to intervene physically, there is security all over G-Square and Wildwood so it’s easy access for anyone who needs help.
Sometimes even just stepping in between the two people fighting could be enough for them to calm down. What many don’t realize is that recording the fight inadvertently feeds more energy to it. There are accounts all over social media posting school fights with people getting seriously injured, yet all we see in the comments are people saying “He got rocked.” More than half of our generation grew up on the internet. As Bo Burnham puts it, “Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two.” We’ve had about 14 years of forced desensitization training in a world where all we seem to preach is sensitivity.
Of course, if one believes someone has a concealed weapon, it isn’t expected of them to rush them “Die Hard” style. However, it is to be expected that authorities are called. These fights are happening because onlookers are letting it happen.
