{"id":21456,"date":"2018-09-17T10:45:11","date_gmt":"2018-09-17T15:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/?p=21456"},"modified":"2018-09-17T11:44:07","modified_gmt":"2018-09-17T16:44:07","slug":"heres-henry-stop-the-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/tartan-news\/2018\/09\/17\/heres-henry-stop-the-challenges\/","title":{"rendered":"Here’s Henry: Stop the Challenges"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0So, I\u2019m 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0But 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 \u201cfire challenge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0The fire challenge\u2026 where teenagers apply flammable liquid to their bodies and flick a lighter. They then quickly douse the flames before they get hurt.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0Just look at that sentence! What\u2019s one of the first things you\u2019re told when you\u2019re little? Don\u2019t play with fire. Yet here we are.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0Why 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0Five years later and kids are setting themselves and others on fire! That doesn\u2019t 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!<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0I 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\u2019t do these).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0In all seriousness, something needs to be done by everyone, young and old, to stop this. I don\u2019t know why or how we got to this point, but we can\u2019t keep reacting to this news with indifference. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0Parents need to continually talk to their kids about this stuff and warn them of the dangers of herd mentality. There\u2019s really no excuse to be so negligent that your 8 year old daughter finds some boiling water and drinks it. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0Smarter kids should be looking out for their friends or others they know that do this crap. They have to discourage this behavior. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0Also, 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\u2019t they be something positive, like a give someone a hug challenge? Or a have a talk with someone completely different than you challenge?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0Think 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0It saddens me to see these challenges in effect, and read articles with the comments of the parents, the victim\u2019s friends, or the victims themselves describing what happened and pleading for others to be on the lookout for this behavior. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0Yet it hurts even more to see commenters\u2019 callous reactions to this. \u201cIt\u2019s just natural selection,\u201d \u201cThey deserve it.\u201d 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0At 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\u2019s a pretty new psychological phenomenon of the last 10 years, and one that we should all be more vigilant in stopping.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Henry Wolski<\/strong>
\n<\/span>Executive Editor<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0So, I\u2019m 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. \u00a0 \u00a0But the other day I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10416,"featured_media":21515,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2109,3],"tags":[2716,2000,2131,1626],"class_list":["post-21456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","category-tartan-news","tag-challenges","tag-henry-wolski","tag-heres-henry","tag-social-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/youtube.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-5A4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10416"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21456"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21516,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21456\/revisions\/21516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}