GET TO KNOW ME MEME· 1/6 Current TV Shows » Glee (2009) - “One day, all of you are going to be gone. And all of this - all of us - will be nothing but a hazy memory. It will take you a second to remember everyone’s name. Someone will have to remind you of the songs we sung; the solos you got, or didn’t get. Life really has only one beginning and one end: and the rest is just a whole lot of middle.”
Description: Woman stands in her yard in a dress, sunglasses and with a white cane and says, “I’m blind and my white cane is great and all, but lately I’ve just been feeling like people aren’t giving me the space I need when I’m walking down the street.”
The same woman stand in the same place with her white cane replaced by a whippersnipper and says, “So I’ve been trying this new cane that promises to command respect and give me the space I deserve. On the downside it’s a little hard to hear the traffic!” She revs the whippersnipper. “But people definitely do move! Coming through!”
Listen, you should never film strangers in public without their consent, but I swear there need to be fines or something for people who do that shit in some spaces. For example: I had to go to the ER last night, and some jerk filmed a woman who just came in and was clearly having an asthma attack. She immediately got to go back, and he was unhappy about that. Believe me, I get that it sucks having to wait when you’re in pain, but you don’t get to pick who deserves care when. The medical system in the US is a nightmare, and the ER could be the worst moment of someone’s life. No one deserves to be recorded because some jack ass believes someone doesn’t look like they need care.
This is fine to reblog. People who film strangers should be shamed if nothing else.
I know a lot of EFR instructors (Emergency first response, the people who teach CPR classes) who used to be ambivalent about this and now are firmly in the “fuck you fuck your phone category.
Maybe its demographics, EFR instructors do tend to be older and less online, but there’s been a shift from voyeur filming being seen as irritating and tasteless to actively harmful.
I met one lady who had an entire section of her lecture based on how to divide labor in emergency and one of those steps was crowd control. If you are taking charge of an emergency situation, you delegate tasks. Point at one person and tell them to call 911, Point at another person tell them to warn traffic, Point at another person tell them to get the first aid kit if you know where it is. You assign small tasks to individuals instead of asking a crowd that way the task actually happens, and you’re not sitting around 20 minutes later wondering why the ambulance is taking so long to show up and it turns out that everyone assumed someone else called.
Now there is another step. Pick a big dude and tell him to stop people from filming. Which is actually the tamest version of what she said, because this lady went on and on about how phones are fragile, light, small, pieces of computer equipment that can be easily punted into oblivion.
And yeah, she’s probably the most vocal proponent of property destruction in the face of voyeur filming I’ve heard lately but she’s far from the only person in emergency services who’s frustrated with the eternal quest for viral videos of strangers pain.
And to be clear there is a huge difference between the paramedic who doesn’t want you filming and the cop who doesn’t want you filming.
The paramedic who doesn’t want you filming is trying to protect someone who is hurt and vulnerable and maybe going through the worst day of their life. That is worthy of respect and if you film someone in medical distress you are a pustulent asshole of a human being.
A cop who doesn’t want you filming is probably trying to violate someone’s civil rights and you should absolutely record away.
