High School Fights and YouTube

I was talking to a group of teenagers the other day whom I counsel, when they put me on to an alarming trend. We were standing around my laptop talking, when one of them asked me to go to YouTube and search for some crazy new dance called the "Stanky Leg" because they wanted to learn it. Unfortunately, all these ridiculous new dances that are out isn't the alarming trend I'm referring to (plus, I see that as just kids being kids). After looking up a couple of dances, one of them asked me to search for a fight. And that began them calling out different high school fights for me to look up.

So what I learned is that you can type in a number of Charlotte high schools, followed by the word "fight," and you're likely to find a video posted of students fighting. I did a quick YouTube search again just now and I found videos of fights at Independence High (a fight outside), East Meck (a fight in the classroom), and West Meck (a fight in the bathroom, which someone has posted and set to music). Each of the videos is less than a minute long, which leads me to believe the students were recording them on their camera phones, which usually only allow short videos.

This video of a fight at Independence High School was uploaded to YouTube last May and has received more than 26,000 views. (I only posted a still as opposed to the actual video because I don't condone this.)

Now before anyone jumps on the bashing-CMS bandwagon, understand that this is not a Charlotte problem. This is a societal problem. Fights have always happened and will always happen at school, and I can't say whether kids today are more violent than we were. But they have more technology at their disposal that brings these things to the forefront. Plus, these fights aren't just being captured at schools. You can find thousands of videos on YouTube of kids (and adults) duking it out in parks, parking lots, streets, backyards, and just about anywhere. If someone can sneak in a camera to capture Saddam Hussein's execution (which I refused to watch), anything can be caught on video at anytime. What we have to do, as a society, is stop lending credence to this kind of thing.

We shouldn't be enticed to run and see or hear every caught-on-tape moment. I reminded those group of teens that kids have gotten arrested over similar video postings. It may seem like something funny and entertaining until you're going to jail over it. My solution to this--and most other problems facing our kids today--is simple. Parents: Be more involved in your kids' lives. Find out what they're doing on MySpace, YouTube, and with their phone texting. Or learn about it the hard way.