Those damned ghetto-ass kids just keep forming flash mobs and robbing law abiding store owners. But after reading posts on mob mentality and group coercion - maybe these were just kids blowing off some steam.
Maybe they were just having a little fun.
Back when I was a kid we'd do some pretty dumb stuff ourselves.
Were the police called? Umm.. sometimes.
But we were smart enough to plan an escape route.
(Except for one time when we lit a field on fire while flicking matches at each other only to put the fire out by running to a nearby irrigation canal to retrieve buckets of water just as the police arrived. We were not arrested but we did receive a stern warning.)
We'd; burn messages into lawns using detergent, pour dish washing liquid into each others pools, egg unsuspecting pedestrians, collect and place dog poop on the mean neighbors car - but we were always just dismissed as kids having fun.
I'm sure we ruined hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of quality Bahia, Rye and/or Bermuda grasses.
Some call graffiti a crime while others see it as art.
Sure, these flash mobs may be participating in illegal activity and they all need their asses whipped - but is there any difference (besides class) when it comes to kids having fun?
(One difference is that we knew that we might get our asses whipped - we even expected it. Some say that spanking children is barbaric and ignorant but then they sit an wonder why they have no control over their own bad-assed kids. These same adults place the blame on society instead of taking responsibility for their own progeny.)
We used to put oil and rocks on the train tracks to derail it :). I'm sure it takes way more than that, otherwise the world would be full of train wrecks. But we knew we would get whooped of caught, and we did. We never engaged into criminal activities like robbery, but our fun was far from innocent.
ReplyDeleteFavorite prank at 14: call random men from the phone book until a woman picks up. Ask for the man of the house in a sexy voice, and say we're dating and lost an earring in his car, and could he please look for it... I wonder how many marital fights we caused :)). Ah, to be young and dumb...and girls can be worse :).
Everyone I knew kept paintball guns in the car "just in case". As in just in case we wanted to shoot some unsuspecting person. You went ice blocking? seriously? We have some questionable cultural overlap UBJ.
ReplyDeleteTP, eggs, mailbox baseball, dry ice bombs... mischief.
One thing we did not do and where a line is crossed.
HEre in Philly flash mobs have taken to beating strangers, tourists, shoppers, into the hospital.
40 year old dude waiting for the train just got a cracked skull and knocked out teeth by a group of kids 11 years old up to 18.
In my day we had a disregard for property. These kids have a disregard for life.
I can't lie as I'm laughing when I see it. Who is the dummy who keeps showing these kids on TV. Now when I was a kid if we would've saw this on TV we would've did it in Compton. I'm sure there will be a whole bunch more coming all over the country.
ReplyDeleteI did a lot of stupid things like taking dirty baby diapers and stuffing the shit in the door handles of cars of people we hated. One time we smeared it on the windows of someone's car and one of my friends came out and said the lady thought a turtle shitted on her car. Now how a turtle could get on the windshield of a car is beyond me.
We weren't organized criminals but we did cause some property damages. But that was in summer when we had nothing to do. I got to hand it to these kids someone in their ranks is a genius and he needs to be stopped before they flash mob the banks.
As kids we'd jump our friends - beat the crap out of them. We would even get in trouble at school for it but we told the teachers we were just playing around (even though the victim of the day would be bloodied).
ReplyDeleteBlack, white, Mexican, Asian - we all played this game. We'd decide at lunch which kid would be jumped and try not to let them know until they were swarmed after school.
I guess the old word-of-mouth was the old school version of a flash mob.
Where is UBJ??
ReplyDelete