It’s a sad day when youths think its fun to toss an elderly 68-year-old woman in a pool. This sad incident, which was captured on cellphone video near Ft. Lauderdale, Florida was barely covered by the liberal mainstream media, because of the races of the perpetrator (who was black) and the victim (who was white). Had the situation been reversed, there might have been a national (or even international) outcry.
The woman in question was merely asking the kids in this instance to lower the volume of the music at their party when they turned on her and threw her into the swimming pool but not before slamming her to the concrete deck. One teen, who turned himself in for the crime, received mere home detention for his actions.
When one watches this graphic clip, one is reminded of similar mob violence that’s occurred in Walmarts and on Black Friday openings of ‘big box’ stores around the country. Studies have shown that when people gather in groups of a certain size, mob psychology can take over and produce a “lowest-common-denominator”-type morality that can have brutal consequences. While clearly, the woman in this video didn’t represent a physical threat to these youths, she presented a psychological challenge of authority that the kids were all too tempted to thwart.
With no immediate consequences for their physical actions and no other authority figures in sight, mob rule quickly took over. While thankfully, the woman was not seriously injured beyond bruising, the lesson here is that the “lowest common denominator” in question has to be set higher. Morality through better education has to be a goal; our whole society suffers when mob rule takes over. Watch the violent moment the mob turned on the old woman and threw her into the pool.
