I’m a big believer that there are a lot of gray areas when it comes to morality and the “right” decision. However, every so often there come situations that make me angry at the people involved and wonder how they make the decisions to act like the lowest kind of person. Just peruse this story on CNN (entitled “Teen ’sport killings’ of homeless on the rise”):

It was a mistake, he said, a sudden primal surge that made him and his friends Luis Oyola, 16, and 17-year-old Andrew Ihrcke begin punching and kicking Baum.

“Luis says ‘I’m gonna go hit him,’ We’re all laughing, thought he was joking around,’” but he wasn’t, Moore concedes. “We just all started hitting him.”

They hurled anything they could find — rocks, bricks, even Baum’s barbecue grill — and pounded the 49-year-old with a pipe and with the baseball bat he kept at his campsite for protection.

Ihrcke smeared his own feces on Baum’s face before cutting him with a knife “to see if he was alive,” Moore said.

After destroying Baum’s camp, the boys left the homeless man — head wedged in his own grill — under a piece of plastic where they hoped the “animals would eat” him.

Then, Moore says, they took off to grab a bite at McDonald’s.

Sure, these kids were drunk, but so what? They made a conscious decision to hurt someone else to a degree that requires some serious internal issues, mentally and/or emotionally. They decided not to just shove someone down, but to destroy someone so completely that they’re humiliated and on the verge of death. That’s not a “mistake.” That’s a “decision.” I know that this article wants me to be sympathetic to this kid who is in jail and feels really bad, but the fact is that he made a decision. Everyone who buys these “Bumfights” videos are a big part of the problem. Who wants to see someone actually beating and terrorizing innocent victims? The idea that this is a growth sector for crime, one in which people find ways to record and profit from these crimes, is absolutely disgusting. These aren’t often crimes of passion– they’re premeditated and carried out with a sick kind of pleasure. I’m not sure I want to understand why anyone does this because, frankly, there can’t be any good reason to hurt an innocent in this manner. Perhaps that’s seems arrogant but I do believe in certain absolutes and this is one of them.

So why do I bring it up if all I’m going to do is complain? This is news. This is real news. This is the front page stuff. Not Anna Nicole. Not Britney. Not Barbaro. Those have value, yes, but this disturbing and growing trend of senseless violence to innocents is the one we need to pay attention to and we need to address. It’s the kind of thing we need to acknowledge and publicly discuss so we can dissuade people from joining in this madness. Perhaps if we encouraged more debate about morality from a philosophical and intellectual standpoint– instead of from a partistan political standpoint– perhaps we’d all grow and become the people we all can be (myself included). But as long as we’re ignoring this in favor of the latest entertainment gossip, we’re all losing out on both an intellectual and spiritual chance for growth.