A fight: Melee outside a store leaves questions for a community to grapple with
By now, many of you will have seen the Facebook Live video circulating on the web displaying a brawl outside the Circle K on Wayne Memorial Drive early Saturday morning.
It was even shared on our Facebook page a couple of times in the comments section under the post of our story detailing the incident from the police report taken afterward.
Only one person -- a 17-year-old male -- reported being assaulted. He said he was jumped by several older men for having danced with one of their girlfriends earlier in the night at Morgan's, a bar on East Ash Street.
But clearly there were more fights than just that one going on simultaneously. Men are seen fighting other men; women are fighting other women. Men were pulling women away from scuffles and hair and clothes and shoes were strewn about.
One man is seen lying on the ground, semiconscious at best.
Many questions arise from this incident -- most of them obvious -- about the drinking establishment and its rules; about the age and the actions of some of the people in the video; about the response by law enforcement.
These are all valid questions that have been or are likely to be asked, and will hopefully soon be answered.
But some of the comments on our Facebook page went a step further, saying things like, this is the kind of incident that results in white flight, or that this is the reason some people have moved away from Goldsboro. And worse, one man -- he has since been banned from our page and his comment deleted -- suggested the kids, most of them African-American, be allowed to just kill one another.
Are these the answers we seek to apply to the questions above? To run away and bury our heads in the sand? To move to another town? Or more sinister, to incite our community's youth to murder each other off?
In no way do we condone or excuse any of the behavior exhibited on that video. Not a single bit of it. And in hindsight, it could have ended a lot worse, had the wrong action been taken either by the youth or by the police.
We are glad it didn't.
Consider this, though, these kids took the time to get dressed to go out that night. They made calls and exchanged texts to arrange rides. When curfews came and went, still these kids were not at home.
No one intervened.
Some of the people seen in that video either doing the fighting or egging it on are adults.
No one intervened.
Even the police were too few to do anything more in a potentially dangerous situation than attempt to clear the area and investigate the incident later.
And maybe in the midst of that melee it would have been wrong to intercede. But what about now?
We know our kids are gearing up to go back to school.
A group called Unite Goldsboro has called for all the men in the community, parents or not, to join together outside Goldsboro High School today, and later on at some other area schools, on the first day of class and cheer our community's kids on as they head back to class.
What better time to intervene? To start somewhere. To show up.
And a one-off isn't a cure-all, we know better. But town halls and community marches took place throughout the spring and summer. A summer jobs program for youth was implemented, and was by all accounts successful.
There is finally a community movement underway and, it would seem, with some momentum behind it.
But for how long will that momentum last if we don't all, black or white, Republican or Democrat, business owner or bricklayer, buy in?
The scene at Circle K shows we adults have our work cut out for us if we are to help curtail some of this violence and point our sometimes irresponsible children in the right direction.
Why should we, you might ask.
Well, for all the times we have sat back and said, "In my day, we didn't act like that. We had neighbors who would call our parents. We lived on streets where everybody knew everybody else."
Here is a mirror.
What streets do we live on now? Do we know our neighbors, or the names of their kids? Are we a part of the village today that we claim used to exist when we were growing up?
If not, then perhaps we shouldn't point the finger at the kids in our community so readily. Not until we have looked at ourselves in that mirror.
And oh yeah, to the man who made the comment about allowing our kids to kill one another as the ultimate solution ... C'mon man. Really?l
Published in Editorials on August 6, 2017 10:58 PM