So, I’m 23 years old and have been able to mostly avoid the craze of social media and the obsession people my age seem to have with documenting everything that happens to them, and doing outrageous things in an effort to gain attention and approval from their peers.
But the other day I read something that utterly baffles me. Timiyah Owens, a 12 year old girl, burned at least 50 percent of her body after attempting the “fire challenge.”
The fire challenge… where teenagers apply flammable liquid to their bodies and flick a lighter. They then quickly douse the flames before they get hurt.
Just look at that sentence! What’s one of the first things you’re told when you’re little? Don’t play with fire. Yet here we are.
Why are people still doing this stuff? I was just getting out of high school when the cinnamon challenge was a thing, and I thought that was dumb.
Five years later and kids are setting themselves and others on fire! That doesn’t even count the Tide Pod challenge or the boiling water challenge, where kids drink boiling water or throw it on their friends. The latter challenge killed an 8 year old girl who drank boiling water through a straw!
I mean honestly, where does it go from here? The shoot your friend in the foot challenge? The jump in front of a car challenge? The pulling teeth challenge? (But seriously, don’t do these).
In all seriousness, something needs to be done by everyone, young and old, to stop this. I don’t know why or how we got to this point, but we can’t keep reacting to this news with indifference.
Parents need to continually talk to their kids about this stuff and warn them of the dangers of herd mentality. There’s really no excuse to be so negligent that your 8 year old daughter finds some boiling water and drinks it.
Smarter kids should be looking out for their friends or others they know that do this crap. They have to discourage this behavior.
Also, why do these challenges have to be something that causes harm to the one doing it or to someone else? Call me an old man but why can’t they be something positive, like a give someone a hug challenge? Or a have a talk with someone completely different than you challenge?
Think back to 2014, and the ALS ice bucket challenge. That was something harmless and funny that was actually really nice. Money went to a worthy cause and awareness of a deadly disease spread around the world.
It saddens me to see these challenges in effect, and read articles with the comments of the parents, the victim’s friends, or the victims themselves describing what happened and pleading for others to be on the lookout for this behavior.
Yet it hurts even more to see commenters’ callous reactions to this. “It’s just natural selection,” “They deserve it.” Maybe so, but this is our future and if we want it to be a successful one, we have to stop people from doing anything to get some YouTube views.
At the end of the day, these are young children that are potentially killing themselves to gain more self worth through internet points, and we should have a little more empathy. It’s a pretty new psychological phenomenon of the last 10 years, and one that we should all be more vigilant in stopping.
Henry Wolski
Executive Editor