A 19 year old Nebraska teen killed himself over the weekend. He did so while broadcasting in a video chat room with lots and lots of other viewers. No one did a thing. It was not until the next morning when someone logged into the chat room and noticed the conversation about it that he called police who went to the home of the teen and found him dead. First of all, I'm guessing the teen who killed himself was probably talking about it before hand and if he starts holding a gun don't you think you should call the police? Don't you have a duty? Even if you don't know the guy or where he lives, call some police somewhere. The person who logged in the next morning knew where the teen lived so I think it is likely the others did too. No one cared. Even after the teen killed himself, no one did anything. Is that how we have become about death? No one cares? That sucks.
Don't generalize. THESE people didn't care, or weren't aware it was real. I don't think it necessarily says anything about society overall, except that we have a window into such awful stuff.
ReplyDeleteI can't even bring myself to watch this (though I'm sure it doesn't show the actual suicide) --- How sad!
ReplyDeleteI think that's the most compassionate news reporter I've ever seen. She looked quite upset.
ReplyDeleteVery sad for the family and for anyone who may have witnessed the shooting.
Horrified
ReplyDeleteThere is still hope for mankind. The comments here and what we see and hear around us every day proves this.
ReplyDeleteI haven't watched it but maybe the people on the chat line didn't think it was true. There's a ton of posturing on the internet so who knows.
ReplyDeleteI actually DO think this generation is epidemically becoming more apathetic.
ReplyDeleteWe've talked about similar things like this in a few sociology classes Im taking....for the past 2 decades, increasingly, kids to young adults and even older are inundated with an influx of so many violent video games/music/movies, you name it, that there is a numbness to actual violence when it happens in real life. Or perhaps an inability to ascertain when real emotions should engage in situational happenings like this. In social psych they will tell you that one of the first things human beings need to comprehend before they assist someone in help is they must understand there IS a danger to the person happening. I believe that this generation, due to the reason I mentioned above, has trouble understanding when fake/simulated violence stops and real violence and danger began.
Given all that - I don't think anyone in the chat room should be held RESPONSIBLE for the event.
ReplyDeleteThe authorities/his parents would probably just like to know how it all went down.
"...for the past 2 decades, increasingly, kids to young adults and even older are inundated with an influx of so many violent video games/music/movies, you name it, that there is a numbness to actual violence when it happens in real life."
ReplyDeleteI wholeheartedly agree. I'm a mistrusting misanthropist who prefers the company of her cats to strangers for a good reason.
Look at the popularity of shit like The Human Centipede, or Hostel, or the Saw series. Don't even try to tell me that those movies are "comedic" and "over-the-top" and thereby morally permissable. PLEASE. Or how about that super-popular military-themed video game that was initially devised *for* soldiers preparing for the battlefield? Twelve year-olds in basements everywhere are merrily pretending to blow people up. Yay.
The advent of reality television is a part of this, too, though the violence in certain shows is still mild compared to the fictive stuff you see on movie screens -- for now, at least. I predict that beheadings and instances of capital punishment will be televised within the next decade. It's just where we're all headed.
Human beings are excited by watching the misery and agony of others. It's arguable that this has always been the case, but we seem to become more and more desensitized the further we evolve. That's what *I* truly don't understand.
I should have said *SOME human beings are excited by watching the misery and agony of others. This sure as hell isn't the case with me, and I'm positive that most of the people who read/comment here are also empathetic people.
ReplyDeleteWhat a terrible story. I hope his family is able to find peace in all of this.
ReplyDeleteI can tell you first hand though that not all people react like this when 'faced' with a suicidal person.
Personal suicide attempt story ahead - move on if this type of thing bothers you...
So I was in the middle of a very dark time in my life and for whatever reason decided to answer a phone call from a 1-800 number in the middle of a panic attack. I told the bill collector that I was in the middle of taking my life and that I had no time to be discussing my credit or behind payments.
I later found out (after being committed by my now 2nd ex-husband) that the cops showed up at the apartment not long after I got off that call. Turns out the bill collector hung up with me and called the police and told them what I said. Finding all of that out is what actually snapped something in my head that made me want to get better and be happy again.
2 years and some change later, I'm still here. So... thanks bill collector guy. I hope you know what you did for me.
it's not just violence.
ReplyDeletelook at the way young women/teens view sex and how casual they are about giving nooner beejays in the cafeteria or at recess. Posting titty duck face pics to Soc Media..spreading video gang rapes via facebook of their classmates.
unreal.
apathy is spreading and entitlement in nipping at its heels.
I remember growing up during Vietnam, and during college we all talked about how all those nightly chants by impartial news anchors (yep in those days most of them tried to portray that image!) of numbers of how many were killed totally desensitized us.
ReplyDeleteIt's gotten so much worse.
There was a story like this a couple of years ago, but the person took a handful of pills instead of using a gun.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if our current society is any more violent than the ones before it. There has been violence since the dawn of man. When I was a kid, cartoons and The Three Stooges were called out for making kids violent.
Throughout history, public hangings seemed to be treated like a day at a park listening to a concert. People rode in from all over, packed a lunch and sat back to watch the show with their families. Gladiators, stoning pits, stockades, burning at the stake...all this was done in front of the public. I forgot to mention beheadings, Catherine Wheel, heads on stakes, whipping/flogging.
It is all same isn't it? Kids played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians or whatever. It seems that since we live in such a connected world-the Internet, television, phones, etc. we see more of this and wew get to see it the moment that it happens.
And people watching without doing anything, that has happened throughout history too. When I was sexually assaulted in a parking lot 30 yrs ago, people were sitting in their parked cars and did nothing while I was being assaulted and screaming two parking spaces away.
It will always happen and it will probably never end. And that makes me sad.
We're absolutely losing empathy for one another on the whole; people are all about #1 and increasingly isolated & alienated - not from immediate family, friends, etc, maybe, but there's a difference between that and SOCIETY. I predict rough times ahead, coming out of this particular bubble. But hopefully we'll be okay...
ReplyDeleteSometimes people don't process the things they are seeing with their own eyes. This is a sad example. Let's face it, at this age, a lot of teens do this kind of thing and never take their own lives. I'm not going to judge these kids too harshly. Now if it were parents seeing this, it would be a different story.
ReplyDeleteOh - and I didn't watch the video. I can't. :(
ReplyDeleteDixie: That may actually be the first time in recorded history that a bill collector's actually done something good for someone they were calling...OK, I'm being a wiseass, but thank God that person had enough of a heart and a brain to make the call for you.
ReplyDeleteThe video is of the news story - they don't show the suicide at all.
ReplyDeleteHere's some hope - an article in our local paper appeared a few weeks ago about 3 facebook friends - one in Belgium, and 2 in this area, but they never met before. The one in Belgium was very depressed and wrote stuff on his wall that highly suggested he was seriously thinking of committing suicide. One kid saw it, messaged the other one and asked if he heard from Belgium in the last few hours. He hadn't. He kept posting on his wall to contact them while the other one had his mother contact our police, who contacted the police in Belgium's town. The kid was ok, but he and his family were grateful for the intervention. He's now in counseling.
Having relayed that, I do believe people (not just kids) have been highly desensitized to ... not just violence, but to inappropriateness and sexuality. Welcome to the Internet Age. No such thing as TMI anymore.
Dang Dixie, you have lived through some shit. Glad you are here.
ReplyDeleteTeam Ida .. all the way.
ReplyDeleteAnd personally, I had something similar happen to me a little under four years ago. A very good friend of mine from a political blog I used to frequent wrote me an email and told me by the time I read it he would be gone. I completely freaked out. I literally ran out of my home office and ran around my house like a chicken with my head cut off screaming and crying because I didn't know what to do. The email was time stamped 3 hours after he would have done it.
I will totally cop to the fact that I lost my shit and it took me 15 minutes to calm down enough to even realize I should call the authorities. But as a lot of my internet friends .. I knew his name but I didn't know his address. He was having severe financial difficulties and didn't have a phone. I just had to rely on the fact I knew he lived beyond a mountain next to Riverside, CA and pray that would lead to something.
I got on my phone finally - about 20 minutes had elapsed at this point - and called the Riverside County Sheriff's Department and was connected with an officer. I told him what little I knew about where he was located and found myself crying and endlessly apologizing to the officer I could not be more helpful.
Finally the officer found a name and a call. Someone else - another gal I also blogged with - had gotten a email and she got it immediately after he sent it. She called the police immediately. They had gotten to his home and gotten to him before he died. I was never so thankful - both to her and the Riverside Sheriff - and also never so ashamed and have never felt like a worse friend.
He was hospitalized for a few weeks and eventually moved away from California entirely and seems very, very happy. But I have to tell you .. I have never felt like a good friend to him. I still have a shitload of guilt that if our other friend had not gotten to his email first, he would be dead because of me.
So .. where I totally agree this world and the generations coming up are f*cked .. maybe some of these people are like me and had no idea what to do and never got beyond the shock and might not have had even the tiny bit of information I had to locate this poor kid.
I think we're so used to 'knowing' that nothing on screen is actually real - BECAUSE of movie/tv/game violence - they may not have believed it was real.
ReplyDeleteThat's why people treat each other like shit online so much - they spread gossip about them and tell their secrets and are vicious and callous. Because it's not real, is it?
@Wil - I can't speak for your friend but I think you did the absolute right thing & probably don't know how much you helped your friend, even if you didn't "get there first". There is so much I could say & so much I'm sure others have already told you - but please know from someone that's been on the other side of the scenario - you did the RIGHT thing.
ReplyDelete@Robin - LoL - I thought the same thing about the guy. I swear to you I wish I knew who he is. I'd love to shake his hand.
@Unicorns - Thank you. I'm glad I'm still here too.
Just my $0.02:
ReplyDeleteI tend to think there are unthinking, uncaring assholes in almost every age group. It gets very tough trying to defend the young because so many of them appear to be savage sociopaths with little compassion who do the most unspeakable things (such as trolling guestbooks being used to leave messages of condolence for the dearly departed or goading depressed people into committing suicide), but you could also say the same with people of every age range who are trolls, go for 4chan-like stuff, etc. They might all be borderline autistic people who've never been trained to be compassionate toward others or feel actual human emotions, but they do tend to make the Internet a much more cruel place than I remember it being when I was 18 and the worst online social interaction got was when people erupted into flame warriors.
Having said that, there are places where you can find great compassion and tenderness, and these are some of the more surprising places around. For example, one forum I used to participate in was dispassionate and almost clinical on the surface. It was a forum community populated greatly by intelligent, pop AND high culture-loving people (so it wasn't TWOP), so a lot of the discussions tended to veer toward esoteric, measured responses. The great majority of these people were also liberal Democrats, which for a Republican-friendly libertarian such as myself would normally be a sign that they'd be abrasive toward my political viewpoints. But no, they weren't! They allowed me to argue my own viewpoints, gave them credence without necessarily agreeing with me, and allowed me to have my own mind about such things. The friends I made from this forum are still the most tolerant/accepting of my own political viewpoints of any of the liberal Democrats I've met, both online and off-.
Then there was one moment when I was still rather new to the forum when I had a moment of deep emotional crisis. I was still shaken up from a terrible life event and given the fact that I have been afflicted with clinical depression in the past, you can see where this led to. I posted anonymously about my emotional crisis on a thread about that subject, distorting my usual posting style to try to throw people off the scent. Within 15 minutes, a board moderator had tracked down my IP and traced it to my usual login, sent information to someone who knew someone who had my home phone number, and I received a phone call from that someone asking me if I was ok. When I read the thread the next day (after I'd fully recovered), I was touched to see how much concern there was in place, even though I wasn't seeking that.
I'd like to think there are certain spots online that would provide that degree of caring and compassion even today, and that those places would be surprising ones. I wouldn't be surprised if the Something Awful people, for example, were capable of that sort of thing, even though it carries a stereotype of being a forum where no one takes anything seriously. OTOH, places where you'd expect to find some measure of compassion, e.g. the PostSecret discussion forums, are places that are so intolerant and closed-minded that you really have to operate under very narrow parameters for a very, very long time to see any measure of acceptance. I've observed that forum for years and have never seen the level of compassion there that I observed at the unnamed forum mentioned above, even though said forum really wasn't designed to be a place of compassion and acceptance (but rather to discuss things in an extremely thorough, almost pedantic fashion).
Anyway, long story short, this issue is not as reliant on generational things as one might think, it can be a surprise who ends up being compassionate and who ends up being intolerant, etc., etc., etc.
"The person who logged in the next morning knew where the teen lived so I think it is likely the others did too" huh?
ReplyDeletethat' doesn't make sense. It's also likely that none of these people in the chat knew where he was from. What do they gain from calling the police? they wouldn't have an adress or a phone or location from the teen.