EDITOR #2
Like you, Concerned Student, I wonder every day why people think they can solve their problems by resorting to physical violence. People vary in the ways they get their point across. Being a newspaper, we advocate the use of words to communicate. Physical contact is another form of communication, but as our campus this week showed us, it can be used very negatively. When people resort to physical harm to another person, the original argument becomes obsolete and the real fight turns into just a power struggle of “who’s better.” People, especially high schoolers, want to make a spectacle of their fight and make people feel for them as if they are gladiators in the ring about to be sacrificed to their vicious animal opponent. The difference is, however, most of us who watch don’t feel bad in the end. We all know that campus fights are a means of the fighters receiving attention that they feel they lack elsewhere.
People need to use words in person rather than on the social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Half of the things kids post on those websites are things that they are too cowardly to say to a person’s face. The lowest and least rational form of dealing with the argument (and hiding their cowardice) is a fistfight. Why? It requires the least amount of thinking.
The social media has enabled kids to say what they want with a cyber barrier in between them and the other side. There is no way to detect a person’s tone or body language the way that real talking does. With the pervasion of the social media also comes a lack of intellectualism in our student body, which I believe is the biggest problem. I notice that the students who hold a more adult-like disposition are those who take pride in learning. The problem is that these kinds of students are only a mere handful of the student body. My question is: how do we make intellectualism as intriguing as these Twitter-prompted fights?