April 01, 2016
Sorry for the delayed reaction to this, but when you’re away for a week in the Florida Keys, catching up with the talk of the town isn’t what one would call easy.
Such is the case with stories about those wildin’ kids slinging punches, saliva and a barrage of ignorant cusses on the Market Frankford Line, which first came to my attention via a link that included references to abortion and “Children of the Corn.”
You’ve probably already seen this video. It includes some abhorrent language that you’d – at a minimum – consider smacking an adult across the face should they scream it into yours. (At least I would, especially when fists and spit flew around the York-Dauphin station.)
In the days since the video arrived in the public conscience, the story has been reeled back in from a place of jaw-dropping judgmental disgust directed at children and parents to the realm of “wait a minute, maybe we didn’t know the full story.”
That step forward came courtesy of PhillyMag, which got its hands on more context-providing video and interviewed Jessica Carreras, the 38-year-old mother and aunt to the children, who range in age from 7 to 11.
Here’s the part of that interview which caught my eye:
How did it feel hearing some white guy call your kid a monkey?
Regardless of ethnicity, I feel it’s sad to refer to children as animals. If we want our children to be respectful, we need to be respectful to them as well.
Quickly, a story about out-of-control kids turned into children going berserk after hearing some ignorance thrown in their direction. Translation: The guy who posted the video on his Facebook page (I won't name him here since I don't know him, but it's out there) wasn’t exactly the citizen-journalist hero he’s been propped up to be.
Let’s be clear: There is nothing good about this story.
When that video went viral, people who knew the children quickly alerted folks as to their identity. To them – I hear – this wasn’t a surprise at all. As seen in the initial video, those kids were entirely unhinged, but they’re not exactly angels the other 364 days of the year. So, with limited information, the reaction was warranted.
The PhillyMag interview steered me in a different direction, though.
While I may post a lot of pictures of my child playing soccer and whatnot on social media, that’s me posting pictures of my child. If someone else was posting pictures of him, well, that would infuriate me.
Juvenile criminal records are sealed for a reason, and it's the same reason one local TV station retroactively blurred the kids' faces out of the SEPTA video.
Which brings us back to the El train, and my takeaway that the video itself never should have been publicly disseminated, even in our WORLDSTAR!, everybody-shares-everything era.
Without the additional videos that PhillyMag viewed, we’d be left with 7-to-11 year olds being publicly branded as uncontrollable cretins for life.
We wouldn’t know that they’d been egged on by the adult behind the cameraphone.
We wouldn’t know that their mother and aunt tried to control a situation that went off the proverbial rails for the world – with access to viral videos – to see.
Was the kids’ behavior abhorrent? You bet your ass it was, but hadn’t someone on the SEPTA El train agitated them, it probably wouldn't have come to that.
So the moral of the story, people, including myself (who once had a habit of sharing YouTube street-fight videos), is this:
Don’t post videos of other people’s children, or what you deem to be instances of bad parenting or questionable morals, especially if you already know you’re not telling the entire story.
You're merely presenting an isolated view of a bigger-picture issue with which you aren't well-versed.
By posting such videos, you’re not making the world a better place. In fact, you’re making a bad place worse for the people about whose life stories you're ignorant, and you sure as hell won't be there to help them find a better life path.
Because that's the aim of airing what you saw to the world, to help those kids out, right? Otherwise, all you did was set out to humiliate children who've yet to go through puberty, and that's no better than swinging fists and flinging insults on the subway.
