This editorial was published in the Winter 2011 Southerner newsmagazine.
South High has an attitude problem when it comes to fights. The problem? We love them.
When a fight occurs during lunch, fourth and fifth hours are buzzing with excitement. Students who got a “good view” give play-by-plays of what exactly happened. All day, people ask “did you hear about the fight?” and “did you see it?” while grinning eagerly.
The problem is that this isn’t WWE we are watching, these are real students getting hurt. When any sort of violence occurs, we shouldn’t be happy about it. These fights pose a danger to the students involved, as well as those who just happen to be standing by. Fists and objects go flying and people can easily get swept up in the fight and be seriously injured. Even people all the way across the commons get pushed aside when people rush up to get a piece of the action. When everyone crowds around, it takes extra time for administrators and security officials to break it up. It’s almost as if we view this violence as a sport.
And, of course, there are the food fights. Food fights have long been portrayed as a fun rite of passage on children’s TV shows and movies. In these fake food fights, people laugh and throw cole-slaw across the cafeteria. Unfortunately, we don’t serve soft and painless cole-slaw, and just ask anyone who gets hit: they aren’t laughing. At the very least, food fights are inconsiderate to these students. No one wants to spend their day covered in chocolate milk, or have to comb chunks of taco meat out of their hair. At their worst, food fights can be dangerous. A South student who was hit by an apple in a food fight had blurred vision for two months, and it’s lucky that it was just that. Throwing an apple across the lunch room could actually kill someone, but instead of seeing food fights as a threat, people see them as a source of entertainment.
When a food fight begins, the lunch room resembles someone throwing a rock into a large flock of pigeons: everyone disperses immediately. For many people, it’s actually quite frightening, and in those first few seconds it’s hard to tell if someone has been hit by a bun or a bullet. This may sound comical, but for many students at South, gun violence is a reality. Students who have had traumatic experiences involving sudden violence could face high anxiety in the lunchroom.
“It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt,” that old saying goes. The problem is that people have already been injured, and the fights still show no signs of letting up. It’s time for us to stop treating fights as a source of fun, and start taking them seriously.