Fast Food Judgement
I just read about a judge who, in an effort to make the punishment fit the crime, sentenced a woman to work in a fast-food restaurant.
According to the Washington Post article, the 39-year-old woman was irate that her fast food meal had not been prepared precisely to her liking, so she threw the steaming hot bowl of chow into the store manager’s face and departed. A 911 call during the incident ultimately led police to the angry woman, who was apprehended at her home.
The judge sentenced the offender to a 180-day jail term with 90 days suspended. But he offered a reduction of 60 days if she agreed to work 20 hours a week for two months in a fast-food restaurant. The woman accepted the deal.
Brilliant! What better way to make the perp understand the trials and tribulations of working in a fast-food restaurant and how she, herself, had compounded them? I do hope it makes her think twice about her dramatic, inhumane behavior.
But I have some doubts.
In the middle of the article—which I was reading online—there was a video that had “gone viral” on Xformerlyknownastwitter. With one click, I could apparently watch the whole ugly incident.
But I didn’t.
Tempting.
But no. The store manager explained to reporters that she’d been embarrassed in front of the customers. (And had to work four more hours with food on her face and in her hair because the restaurant provided no relief.) I felt that watching the video would be an act of further humiliation, even though the manager would never know (a) that I exist, or (b) that I watched the forever-catalogued live-action record of her humiliation.
I recognized I was probably in the minority. Most folks who read the story likely watched the video. So I pondered the difference between me and most folks: I am older. I come from a time when privacy was normal.
A time when the drive to be famous could not so easily be assuaged.
Shortly before my retirement, one of my 7th grade students excitedly whipped out her phone to show me a video of herself engaged in a bona fide screaming, scratching, hair-pulling fight with another student. She was proud of it. Wanted to share her achievement with me. She was famous! This was the first inkling I had that the ubiquity of pocket computers (aka “phones”) might be generating a perverse need to be seen—no matter the scenario.
And indeed, since then, I see an epidemic of desire to be in the public eye. How many times can you get yourself on TikTok or Xformerlyknownastwitter? How many “views” can you achieve? Maybe if you really work at it you can become an “influencer” and make some money.
To watch the video of this mad woman screaming and tossing piping hot food into another woman’s face would be, in some small way, supporting her apparent desire for attention. At the very least, it would add one more “view” to the collection plate on her road to internet glory. A contribution I’d prefer not to give.
I understand that my resistance is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. But maybe I could start a movement. If you’re pretty sure you don’t approve of the motives or the behavior of persons starring in the videos that appear on your computer, don’t support them. Don’t watch. Your “view” is your vote. Use it wisely.