I can honestly admit that there was a time before now when I would search the web for internet fight videos to see what craziness people would post of street fights and school students pouncing on one another for the world to see. Since then I’ve grown to disgust these videos as they’ve become more and more popular over these short years. It appears now that people are in the streets taunting and instigating these fights now specifically for the camera. I don’t look at the sensation of the violence the same as I did before. Nowadays I see the images as a stark reality of what we’ve degraded to as a society and what poor future we have in store for the following generations. Aside from the slightly present anti cyber bully campaigns that are out to curb the foolishness there doesn’t seem to be a foreseeable end to the display of ignorance we’ve come too accustomed to lately. There needs to be an end somehow someway.

My biggest problem is when I see inner city people of color engaging in senseless violence on camera. The root of the fight is almost never revealed and it only looks like a bunch of dummies out to brutally kill each other all while the camera person chuckles, heckles, and instigates the violence further and further. As time has progressed I’ve noticed a key difference in what these videos used to be and what they are now. Today people are prepared for the camera and the camera is the true judge. If the camera wasn’t present I seriously doubt the violence would be as brutal. The individuals in these fights are now performing for an audience they know is larger than the one physically present. The desensitization has reached a point when people are dying on camera and nobody flinches. When will people realize we are our only enemies?

As we continue to perpetuate what is a new phenomenon of instantaneous access to viral violence, we will get entranced by something that is not healthy for our own senses as well for our culture. Everyone will find it absolutely normal to stop what they’re doing on a quiet day out in town to record a street fight and upload it onto the web from their recording device, laugh and share the images, then go about their day. No one will stop to think, what about the innocent who saw that and now think it’s okay to move along and allow violence to supersede peace? Ignorance cannot be the answer to random violence.

As law enforcement becomes a larger presence in the social atmosphere, who will protect children from the grips of police who don’t mind apprehending the young people they see engaging in the stupidity of these videos? No one will, because ironically their parents will also be apprehended due to the fact they are in the same video. There has to be a correction to this. I’m ashamed of the dumbness possessed by people who share my skin color in these videos. Every last one who still thinks it’s not their problem, but those in the videos should feel just as ashamed.

I believe we’re embarking on a time in America when racial inequality will take a backseat to social inequality full and out right. People of color will be hanging on to the argument of racial inequality for dear life, meanwhile society will say, “but look at how stupid most of you act in public.” A video will be shown of a school fight, an apartment complex fight, a fast food restaurant fight, and a fight between a family. Everyone will look at each other and say, “well that’s just those types of people.” The idea that there is a racial divide will be diluted and those who are ignorant to the fact will be forgotten. This is not what we should wish for. We can’t allow our actions to be the reason we are denied access to the gains of our society. It’s time for our cameras to display something more important. Until we find out what that is then we need not press record.