That’s a scene above from Quentin Tarntino’s “Death Proof,” and a dumber movie you are never likely to encounter. The clip is there not to celebrate the movie, originally half of a misconceived bomb called “Grind House,” but to illustrate the real and incredibly stupid phenomenon called “car surfing,” which has had a recent resurgence among teens thanks to social media.
15-year-old Cyprus High School (Utah) sophomore Ava Broadhead is now in a coma after she fell off the top of a moving car. She was car-surfing, and “unfortunately, pavement isn’t as forgiving and the victim hit their head,” a police officer told the news media. Ava suffered massive head injuries and faces a long recovery, with the chances of regaining her previous level of brain function slim.
A GoFundMe page seeks donations for Anna, stating, “Your generous donations will go directly toward her medical care and the resources needed to support her recovery. Any amount, no matter how small, will make a huge difference in Ava’s journey. If you are unable to contribute financially, we ask that you keep Ava in your prayers and share her story to raise awareness about the real dangers of car surfing.”
Who has have explained to them the dangers of riding on the outside of a moving car?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
How much compassion and sympathy, if any, is appropriate in response to someone harming themselves by engaging in such reckless behavior?
This kind of story always puts me in a quandary; I think I have posted about my dilemma before. My son nearly got himself killed or crippled a few times, although never doing anything quite as stupid as car-surfing. I note that the Go-Fund-Me page has raised only $6,000 so far, and I strongly suspect the weak response is because many have the same reflex reaction I do, which is that I’d rather give money to the victims of misfortunes they didn’t almost literally ask for. Anna’s story reminded me of the July Fourth accident this year when an idiot put fireworks on his head and set them off.
Of course Anna gets some points off her Darwin Awards score by virtue of her tender age…but how many? She devastated her own life while immersing her family in tragedy and the crushing burden of caring for her. It wasn’t intentional, but a drunk getting behind the wheel of a car isn’t intentionally trying to kill anyone, either.
I know that this self-inflicted tragedy will naturally cause many to blame social media. The suspicion lingers, however, that anyone foolish enough to try car-surfing is going to be disaster-prone one way or another.
Ethics Alarms 
How much compassion and sympathy, if any, is appropriate in response to someone harming themselves by engaging in such reckless behavior?
I think we all reflexively feel sympathy for a tragedy like this, even a self-inflicted one. I think that is certainly ethical.
But when I try to place myself in the place of her parents, I would be far too ashamed to ask for money. I would blame myself for lack of parental supervision and being unable to educate my child to the point she would know better than to risk her life that way.
I know I did some unsafe things as a youth, and if everything had gone just wrong, I might not be around to write this, or perhaps would be around but incapable of writing anything.
However, this is a case where almost everything had to go right for her to avoid serious injury. I can’t remember a single time where I placed myself in that position.
I am sorry for her injury, but only in the sense that it is always a tragedy when a young person is so badly injured. The manner of it prevents me from anything else.
My instinctive answer is ‘none’. 15 is absolutely old enough that she should be aware of how dangerous this was and why it was a bad idea.But I might have pity for her presumed lack of IQ, since that may not be her fault. I also might have some sympathy if they were going, say, 5 miles an hour and she had a bike helmet on, or if there was SOME sign of her taking precautions. Or if it turns out the driver did something like suddenly turn, making it his or her fault in part.
I see nothing in the story to indicate such, and I’m assuming there wasn’t.
I suspect her donors are mostly people who did the same thing as a teenager, and thought “there but for the grace of god…”
Bah… apparently posted mid edit. Second sentence should end “…should be aware of how dangerous this was and why it was a bad idea.”
I added the missing text…
I don’t necessarily like blaming this on social media. I think that is putting the blame in the wrong place.
When I was in high school, a kid I had been in school with since first grade made a dumb choice. He killed two women by driving recklessly. At sixteen, he was tried as an adult and went to prison for two counts of vehicular manslaughter. I’m calling him Sam.
While no one can truly understand another’s reasoning, for those of us who knew him his whole life, the reasons for doing what he did were fairly obvious. Sam was one of two fatherless boys raised by their mom and grandma. The grandma, especially, did an okay job trying to raise him, putting him in the Catholic school, and holding to the old time values of respecting your teacher, ladies, etc. However, he never really managed to fit in with the other boys. In order to gain attention and acceptance, he willingly enacted whatever crazy idea the other boys conceived. Maybe it was bullying a girl. Maybe it was doing some silly prank. I was the target of a serious prank that was traced back to him when I was in fifth grade. He was in deep trouble and only avoided expulsion because Sister knew that this would never have come only from him. So when there was a rumor running around that if you drove down X road at Y mph, you could jump the main highway 3 miles east of town, it was logical that Sam would be pushed into trying it out. And try it out he did, with some of his fellows in the car. During third period, he T-boned two old ladies at the junction of X road and the highway at over 100 miles an hour.
Not a bit of this excuses what he did, nor did the judge show the slightest bit of sympathy for his circumstances, but I think this reveals to us a missing piece of the puzzle, a crucial piece that is necessary to understand the entire picture.
More and more kids are growing up in single parent households. Parents are addicted to technology. Kids are missing out on appropriate interaction with their parents. Our current society also has kids in more and more activities, meaning with less and less time in situations with only a few kids per adults, and lots of time with many other kids, who are not the best source of good healthy ideas.
A healthy childhood requires a kid to learn about responsibilities, not just license, that actions have consequences and other items necessary for adult decision making. Teens seem to be primed to think they are invincible by biology, and now society is not working to teach them the skills they need to combat that, but instead focuses on lengthening the time a person can act with license and without responsibility.
Now that we have a whole segment of the population that is like Sam, and the balance of probability states that Ava would fall into that segment, only now can the idea of adding social media in be considered.
Social media allows all kinds of trends to occur at light-speed, so that a parent who is trying to be good doesn’t even have time to warn against the dangers of the last three trends before needing to know about the current one. So if car surfing is now the thing that cool kids do, and if Ava wants to be a cool kid, she has to try it out and show it off to everyone. Or it could be that one of the cool kids wants to try car surfing, but isn’t sure if it is safe, but “Ava’d do it first.” Either way, social media was only the trigger, but the whole gun was primed anyway. If Sam could kill two ladies with a car over a rumor before anyone spent much time online during the days of dial-up, Ava could have done as much with a movie.
So rather than saying that we need to worry about social media, we need to figure out ways to teach our kids to think through their actions. We need to return to teaching kids responsibility and consequences. That requires parents to be present to their children, engage with them, give them tasks that build their esteem in their own eyes, and provide the affirmation that they will otherwise look for in all the wrong places. That’s how we get away from these tragedies.
Do I feel compassion for Ava? Of course I do. She and her family will live with this choice of hers forever. A kid makes dumb choices and the family lives with them, carrying the grief of that dumb choice for the rest of their live.
This has played out many times in my life before now, with all of us paying in odd ways for a dumb choice. However, I want to change this for my kids, if I can, so I must give them the tools they need to succeed.
Comment of the Day, Sarah. As is often the case..
Excellent work, Sarah…as usual. I will offer a slight counterpoint, using the same experience as the one described by Jack.
I worked with high-school students at a church back in the ’90s and one of our students tried car-surfing in the church parking lot after Sunday-night youth group (after I had gone home but while there were three other adults on-site). He ended up in the ER bleeding from his concussed head, though he made a full recovery with no lasting issues. The poor girl driving the car was an even bigger wreck.
Those involved in the incident were from good homes with strong, present parenting, in an era long before social media and YouTube…heck, the internet was barely a “thing”.
I’m not going to disagree with what you wrote, because it’s correct. I just want to emphasize that “signs of immaturity” – childish behavior, lack of foresight, the need for popularity, and the inability to consider the consequences – are part of being a child…and an adolescent…and a teenager. And when teenagers are grouped together, all of these “signs” are multiplied by the number of those present. It is inevitable that immature behavior will be considered, then endorsed, then acted out.
This is why, over the years, I’ve become wary of even good, beneficial things involving large numbers of young adults gathering together, such as church youth groups and youth conferences. While they have benefits, they are also a “concentrating of immaturity” where bad things like car-surfing…or fighting…or drugs…or alcohol…or sex…can happen.
This is hard to write (because I was a teenager once…and a pretty good one), but young people are fools without life wisdom. Older people may be fools, but they have life wisdom. Teenagers hate it when I say this, but I’m a firm believer that they should spend much more time with adults than with each other. They will much more quickly put childish ways behind them and (hopefully) stop acting like fools.
I think a lot of this type or risk taking is due to kids having helicopter parents who never let their children take any risks whatsoever while growing up so that the children never learn when young how to assess risks. So when out with their friends they can’t assess which risks to take and which risks to avoid.
My thought as well. Kids who are taught to do potentially dangerous activities carefully (hunting, using power tools, or sharp knives and hot stoves, etc.) have a better understanding of what can go wrong.
We do a fairly poor job of teaching emotional regulation and validating those emotions while requiring adherence to standards. So children explore, and as potentially destructive technology becomes more easily accessible exploration will result in these sorts of tragedies.
My knee jerk guess is that this event was directly proportional to parenting. In which case, I would view these people as a unit and a self-perpetuating chain. If the child really was so innately addled then it was bound to happen. And, therefore, no real reason for sympathy as the child is the parent. A copy. The outcome is who the person is. That the parent lived this long without some similar outcome is luck.
Sympathy for the generic trauma of losing a child yes. Anything else, nope. Certainly not perpetual care provided by the government. 100 years ago this person would just have died.
Several years ago, one of my students was injured in a variation on this theme. She was acting in a student-directed film, playing a pedestrian who was hit by a car.
This is not the kind of scene that ought to be entrusted to a student director. Yes, they had a plan to ensure her safety: the car moving quite slowly, a mattress for her to land on when she rolled off the hood, etc. But no one who actually knew (or apparently cared) about actor safety was involved in the decision-making. My student trusted the people who claimed to have the solution… and then the mattress was in the wrong place, and she landed on pavement. Luckily, her injuries, though significant, were not life-threatening or permanent, although of course they could have been.
Although many if not most of the actors in these films are theatre students, no one else on these projects is. I talked to the chair of the department that includes film-making. He expressed sympathy for my student, but the student director still got a good grade, and the faculty member who signed off on the stunt wasn’t even questioned, let alone reprimanded.
La la how the life goes on.
Yikes. This harkens back to the early days of film, when actors took insane risks under the encouragement of directors who just wanted a spectacular shot. But at least they were risking their lives for art, not an idiotic social media challenge.
I think one of the things missing here is public reproval of such behavior. One of the problems with giving too much sympathy to a person injured in this way is that it suggests that there was nothing wrong with the behavior. Children then don’t realize it is wrong and believe the behavior to be acceptable. Several years ago, two students were doing double the speed limit in town on a road with pronounced curves, trying to get back to school after skipping class. They missed a curve, hit a car, killing themselves and the elderly driver of the other car. The school cancelled classes for a day and had a big memorial for them with mandatory attendance by all students. The school was treating them as heroes when they would have been tried for vehicular manslaughter if they hadn’t died themselves. I thought they should have gotten no recognition at all. They should have been treated as embarrassments, not heroes.
When I was a teenager, I watched one of those ‘afterschool specials’ about a high school student who kills someone while driving drunk, is ostracized, and then everyone forgives him in a redemption story. When it was over, my father said “If you ever do that, just don’t come home. Just don’t come home.” That was a pretty strong message that such behavior is NOT acceptable.
Excellent points made all around.
When my husband and I were working hard at our jobs, then doing double and triple duty at home with our four children, there weren’t many options for child care, and not a lot available at all for teens who would no longer go to Grandma’s after school. We were not helicopter parents whose children rebelled, just working to keep a roof over our heads and the bills paid.
We had both been well behaved youths, perhaps because we’d been working since we were young and studying hard for good grades. It never occurred to us that our children would behave recklessly.
Dozens of years after the fact I learned that on a regular basis teenagers were jumping and diving off our roof into the pool. They weren’t bad kids – just adventurous and stupid. We and they are all blessed that nothing horrible happened.
It is always easy to blame – parents, media, educators, government, society. But adolescence is a time when children are spreading their wings, testing their limits and asserting independence. It is impossible to anticipate every problem or issue, and impossible to watch them all the time.
I am happy to say that they all made it to adulthood. As for my grandchildren …
I posted all kinds of droll “advice” related links at Sara’s Comment of the Day based on this, but without actually engaging the original question. Sorry about that.
Here is the original question:
“How much compassion and sympathy, if any, is appropriate in response to someone harming themselves by engaging in such reckless behavior?”
My guess is this.
It’s appropriate to express sympathy and compassion in the abstract, to the young person and especially to her mother, but the tricky part is what are we supposed to do after that? I think there is an impulse for many of us to turn away, to excuse ourselves from the situation. It’s almost like there is a some animal instinct where we want to care for an injured fellow yet simultaneously there is a different impulse to just stay away, stay silent, don’t get involved, life is tough, take care of number one.
To address Jack’s question we need at some point to measure compassion and sympathy. He asked “How much?” I don’t know any metric for it. I’m not being sarcastic, I’m being analytical. Until we can measure behaviors such as donating money to a GoFundMe or number of trips to the hospital or visiting with the sorrowful mother and helping her and her daughter (no father was mentioned in the article, and I think no siblings), who is to say that I’m more compassionate and sympathetic than Michael R but less compassionate and sympathetic than Phlinn.
I could say “Hey, Michael R: I donated $100 to the GoFundMe. Why don’t you do the same?” And then Michael R responds with “Are you out of your mind? Charlie Abbott you are a moron, a bleeding heart…you might even be making all of this worth with your Oh You Poor Baby approach.”
I feel like there is an element of “moral confounding” here, to use the phrase I learned from Stephen Pinker. But perhaps that’s not the correct phrase. Definitely there is “moral hazard,” or something that raises the issue of distinguishing between “deserving” and “undeserving” beneficiaries or help. Victorian thought made a clear distinction between the “deserving and undeserving poor,” for example.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
The following essay often comes to mind. It doesn’t perfectly fit the issue at hand, but it’s relevant.
https://www.aei.org/society-and-culture/stigma-makes-generosity-feasible/