Somewhere on Nehoa Street, outside Roosevelt High School, there was a fight. A gang from another school had shown up after the bell. What followed was the kind of chaos that burns into memory. Boys spilling into the road, thudding sounds, the feeling of not knowing whether to stay and watch or walk away. I couldn’t tell you how it started. I couldn’t tell you how it ended. The details have faded the way details do when nobody was recording them.
That’s the thing about human memory. It compresses, softens, and eventually lets go. A fight that felt huge at the time becomes, 20 years later, a blur of raised voices and adrenaline.
Hawai‘i has always had a fighting culture. Anyone who grew up here knows this. The scraps behind the gym, the girls smacking each other and pulling hair in the cafeteria, the boys heading to a nearby park to settle something. None of that is new. Schools have never been the sanctuaries we pretend they are. Something in the tenor of what happens in them now feels different.
What is new — truly new — is that the fight never has to end.
There are Instagram accounts built around filming street fights in Hawaiʻi. They get shared in group chats and stitched into highlight reels. The culture that produced Worldstar HipHop — filming strangers on their worst day — has been handed down to teenagers. They have taken to it eagerly.
The camera doesn’t just record a fight. It changes the fight. It adds an audience that’s hungry, and a hungry audience changes the performer. The boy who might have walked away now has a reason not to. The girl who threw the first slap throws three more because someone is watching. The recording doesn’t capture the event. It becomes the event.
Consider Carly Ng — a woman with special needs, beaten by a group of teenagers more than once, the attacks filmed and shared. The response was swift, and it too went live. Neighbors hunted down the alleged attackers in crowdsourced justice, streaming the pursuit as it happened.
Shakespeare set the same sequence in Verona. A wrong done, then avenged, then avenged again. The tragedy doesn’t belong to any single act but to the momentum the original act creates. Someday soon, someone in these videos is going to die. It might be a victim who hits the pavement wrong. It might be someone who stepped into the final act of a very old play.
The spectacle is the problem. The performer needs an audience, and we’ve been a willing one. What does it mean to scroll past a video of a teenager getting knocked out and feel nothing — or worse, feel something like satisfaction?
Paul’s instruction in Philippians is not a polite suggestion to think nice thoughts. “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Our appetite is not neutral. What we feed it trains us in what to want. A generation raised on this content is being trained toward something. It is not honorable or lovely.
Put the phone down. Don’t record fights; don’t watch them. None of this requires a new law or a task force. It requires the older, harder thing: deciding that the appetite for spectacle is worth resisting.
The worry is that we have already gone further than we realize. In fight videos, you can sometimes see the fencing response — the reflexive arm stiffening that signals serious brain trauma. It’s the same thing that ended Tua Tagovailoa’s career in Miami. It is a body responding to a life in crisis. The crowd, meanwhile, holds up its phones, eager for more.
Pray we don’t record what comes next. By then, we won’t know we should have looked away.
