Handcuffing Kids

By now, most of the country has heard about the grade-school-aged kids arrested in Murfreesboro, TN, for failing to intervene in a fight. (See this article on MSN.) Curious how my fellow Americans reacted, I read the comments following the MSN posting of this article. Sadly, what I found was further evidence of how selfish we have become as a society.
     While my first thought was, "those kids will learn fights aren't entertainment," I noticed that many took the race bait offered up by one of the world's most irresponsible reporters, Jessica Bliss, who manages to find a way to stir up the Black community in every situation. First of all, only half of the arrested kids were of any single color. The others were not, but Ms. Bliss fails to bother mentioning the other race or races involved. Way to go Americans! You've let the media manipulate you yet again so they profit from your misplaced outrage. Great job.
     Next, I realized my fellow parents out there displayed a complete lack of comprehensive thinking. Yeah, it would suck if your kid was one of those arrested. It could be embarrassing and probably expensive in the short term. At least in the long run, assuming you don't react like an idiot, little Johnny would do the right thing next time and learn there are consequences for our actions, even when those actions are inaction.
     Parents, before you moan about how awful it is to handcuff a first grader, put yourselves in the shoes of the victim's parents. It must've been a pretty brutal fight to draw a crowd and be deemed worthy of other kids whipping out their cell phones and taking video of it. Sometimes kids suffer permanent brain damage, crippling injuries and even die as the result of a good grade-school beating. It happens more than you probably want to hear. Would you be complaining about this if it was your kid suffering the beating? Or would you agree that kids today need to run to an adult and tell them about the fight before they start SnapChatting it or posting it to Instagram? The sad state of our society is that we have devolved to a bunch of media-worshipping "Like" whores, and our kids are sacrificing intelligent decision-making and concern for their fellow man in place of the never ending search for thumbs up, much to the detriment of our society as a whole.
     Sure, it's not likely all those kids were taking selfies during the fight, but they were certainly doing something in that video worthy of drawing the attention of law enforcement. I'm betting they were cheering, laughing, and otherwise treating the fight as a source of entertainment rather than the crime a good beating really is. This makes them bullies, or future bullies, and the police are right to teach them that's not okay, especially when their parents are too self-focused to teach that lesson themselves.
     Kids don't fight like we did, parents. Now, they are so desensitized to violence that their goal is to kill their opponent. They don't think twice about beating another kid in the face until their victim needs plastic surgery. They don’t think twice about using anything within reach as a weapon or kicking until they shatter ribs and bruise or break internal organs. And the standers-by see it as entertainment. There's something seriously wrong with that and there is nothing wrong with teaching a six-year-old that it's not okay to stand there and take video instead of getting help. If the Murfreesboro police felt handcuffs were the right way to deliver that lesson, then I, for one, stand by them. "Failure to intervene" doesn't mean there was an expectation that a small child would break up the fight, it means they failed to follow that basic rule of "Tell an adult" that they learn the first day of kindergarten.
     It's time we stop making excuses for our kids and start raising them to be responsible citizens. A lesson I hope the ten kids in Murfreesboro learn from this experience, even if their litigious "supporters" do not.