Monday, November 14, 2005
Common Sense and Self Defense
Last night I watched a late night news show which ran two stories; one of which disgusted me and the other disappointed me.
The first story was about an officer at a correctional facility who was making obscene phone call from a pay phone. Over the course of 10 years he made over 70 phone calls to various fast food restaurants around the country and asked senior staff or managers to conduct “searches” of staff or guests and to detain these “dangerous people” until police would arrive. Now, at first, the fact that a man gets pleasure from making disgusting phone calls is very weird; but what is even weirder is that the managers actually listened to the man making the phone calls. The story on TV was about an assistant manager at a McDonalds who conducted a strip search of an underage, female employee at the request of the man on the phone. And since it was the dinner rush and the assistant manager had to get on the counter and work, she followed the man on the phone’s request and had her middle-aged fiancée watch the underage girl – by now the girl was naked and barely covered with an apron. Continuing to listen to the man on the phone, the assistant mangers fiancée had the teenage-girl perform calisthenics, he spanked her, and even performed sexual acts with the girl. Do you need to re-read this paragraph? It sounds ridiculous; I could barely believe what I was seeing on TV. Do you know what the manger’s excuse was? She said, “I though he was a police officer.” Hold on, the story is about to get worse. This is not an isolated event. Over the 10 years and 70 phone calls this man got people to conduct a number of sexual acts, cavity searches, beating and countless acts of physical, mental and sexual abuse. [look up ABC’s Fast Food Nightmare on Google] These actions even included the “searches” of customers at one Taco Bell. This sounds so ridiculous that I can’t even believe it as I write this. So the question I pose to people is:
Where is your common sense?
Where is your sense of decency?
When did people stop thinking before acting?
I do not study psychology, of physiology, sociology or any other “ology,” so I do not feel like I have the authority to try and dissect these people’s actions. Maybe people have always been this stupid and I just don’t know enough about people in the past. But I find it hard to believe that something like this would have happened 100 years ago.
The other story was about school shootings and how children need to know how to react. Yes, very true. In a nutshell, safety experts went to a school and conduct a couple fake shootings (experiments); they looked at how the kinds reacted and then corrected their behavior. They even allowed some of the parents to view the footage. They basically told the kinds how to run out of the building and keep running, don’t run toward the armed student, don’t run into dead-ends like restrooms, etc. Now, while this advice is all well and good, what surprised me the most were the parents. The number one comment parents made were something to the effect of: “I should have told my child to fight back, I should have told my child to defend themselves at all costs.” Now this was a paraphrase, but the point I’m trying to make is that many American schools no longer play dodge ball because it is too dangerous, they don’t keep score in gym so ‘everybody wins,’ some schools don’t give grades – so we spend all our time coddling our children and protecting them from the real world and then we wonder why they crack under pressure. We have raised a generation of children with no “back bone;” kids are getting softer and weaker and no one seems to care. But this is a topic for another page when I have more time to explain why average American children are getting their butts kicked in everything from academics to athletics by foreigners, immigrants and poorer kids who are just plain hungrier.
The first story was about an officer at a correctional facility who was making obscene phone call from a pay phone. Over the course of 10 years he made over 70 phone calls to various fast food restaurants around the country and asked senior staff or managers to conduct “searches” of staff or guests and to detain these “dangerous people” until police would arrive. Now, at first, the fact that a man gets pleasure from making disgusting phone calls is very weird; but what is even weirder is that the managers actually listened to the man making the phone calls. The story on TV was about an assistant manager at a McDonalds who conducted a strip search of an underage, female employee at the request of the man on the phone. And since it was the dinner rush and the assistant manager had to get on the counter and work, she followed the man on the phone’s request and had her middle-aged fiancée watch the underage girl – by now the girl was naked and barely covered with an apron. Continuing to listen to the man on the phone, the assistant mangers fiancée had the teenage-girl perform calisthenics, he spanked her, and even performed sexual acts with the girl. Do you need to re-read this paragraph? It sounds ridiculous; I could barely believe what I was seeing on TV. Do you know what the manger’s excuse was? She said, “I though he was a police officer.” Hold on, the story is about to get worse. This is not an isolated event. Over the 10 years and 70 phone calls this man got people to conduct a number of sexual acts, cavity searches, beating and countless acts of physical, mental and sexual abuse. [look up ABC’s Fast Food Nightmare on Google] These actions even included the “searches” of customers at one Taco Bell. This sounds so ridiculous that I can’t even believe it as I write this. So the question I pose to people is:
Where is your common sense?
Where is your sense of decency?
When did people stop thinking before acting?
I do not study psychology, of physiology, sociology or any other “ology,” so I do not feel like I have the authority to try and dissect these people’s actions. Maybe people have always been this stupid and I just don’t know enough about people in the past. But I find it hard to believe that something like this would have happened 100 years ago.
The other story was about school shootings and how children need to know how to react. Yes, very true. In a nutshell, safety experts went to a school and conduct a couple fake shootings (experiments); they looked at how the kinds reacted and then corrected their behavior. They even allowed some of the parents to view the footage. They basically told the kinds how to run out of the building and keep running, don’t run toward the armed student, don’t run into dead-ends like restrooms, etc. Now, while this advice is all well and good, what surprised me the most were the parents. The number one comment parents made were something to the effect of: “I should have told my child to fight back, I should have told my child to defend themselves at all costs.” Now this was a paraphrase, but the point I’m trying to make is that many American schools no longer play dodge ball because it is too dangerous, they don’t keep score in gym so ‘everybody wins,’ some schools don’t give grades – so we spend all our time coddling our children and protecting them from the real world and then we wonder why they crack under pressure. We have raised a generation of children with no “back bone;” kids are getting softer and weaker and no one seems to care. But this is a topic for another page when I have more time to explain why average American children are getting their butts kicked in everything from academics to athletics by foreigners, immigrants and poorer kids who are just plain hungrier.
