Can We Get the First of the Story?

 I like the randomness of YouTube and even Facebook rabbit holes. How else can you learn about vicious neighborhood feuds and how a guy came to acquire a 1953 corvette, all in one sitting? Sometimes the internet is your friend and helps you find things, and sometimes it is a hunter, tracking you down to kill your time. 

Whenever I see videos of people freaking out, my first thought is, "Have I ever posted with them on Twitter or Facebook?" There are a lot of vitriolic, damn-near mentally ill people on the internet. They are out there on the streets too, and in their natural habitats of neighborhoods and stores. Karen's- ya know. Now, as a Ferrerman, I fancy myself to be a fair man. I ponder whether they are always upset as they are in the video, or whether something or other happened before the tape started rolling. Much of life is timing and you are not always getting the full story in a short video.

There's a guy on the internet who calls himself, "Tizzy Ent". I don't know why. Why am I a Ferrerman? That's a ferrer question. The answer is, "Who cares?" I didn't like Tizzy at first. All his videos seemed to be about *Karens* getting angry at black folks and calling them the n-word. He'd put these Karen's out there with the hopes of someone knowing their name and address and hopefully getting them fired. 

I just couldn't respect that. People getting filmed on what may be the worst day of their life (the worst day of their life so far...) doesn't necessarily define them. It could- but we don't know that because we rarely get to witness the complete interaction, from the beginning. I would like to know what prompted the juicy part of any conflict because, except in cases of truly mentally ill street people verbally or physically assaulting random people for no reason, there's likely to be an actual catalyst with our more mainstream citizens that might explain why a chance meeting escalated so quickly. Paul Harvey always said: "Now we get the rest of the story..." I want the first of the story, if you please. 

With the early Tizzy videos, I could not help but wonder why there were so many overweight, middle-aged white women running around screaming the n-word at black men. I wouldn't do that. It's rude and dangerous. Very confusing, aberrant behavior, by anyone, but especially by older, white females. 

My take was that since we didn't know what precipitated the hostilities, why not leave the 'outing' out of it and just move on to the next whacky video. There's always more where that came from. 

We've all been in the sixth grade, so we know that if there is a beef between two boys or two girls, the time-honored way to exploit that is to push one into the other. By grade school law, they have to start throwing hands. Them's the rules.

Well, I suspect that grade school antics may well carry over to adulthood for much of the population. And with nearly everyone these days having a video camera in their hand or purse, everyone can be the hero or victim (maybe both) in their own story. Editing skills might help too. Even without the lifetime ban from YouTube that I'm serving, I have no desire to put any videos on it. Others do. "Fifteen Minutes of Fame"? Ain't nobody got time for that! Maybe three to five minutes.

You can't always get the whole story in life. And yeah, sometimes stuff happens and then you reach for your phone. But if Hollywood films and TV news can get things so wrong (for their own reasons) maybe we should take everyday life caught on tape with a grain of salt too.