No, A Jury of MY Peers

MTV's The Real World is one of my guilty little vices. I've been watching the series going way back to the first year in New York. Every year when the new season rolls around I swear off the show citing its increasingly shallow group of characters and apparent growing orchestration of events for dramatic effect. But invariably I catch a moment here, a moment there, and next thing you know a 'Real World Marathon' comes on one day when I'm nursing a hangover on the couch and bingo I'm hooked again.

This year's show is set in Las Vegas and features more of the same whiny, immature, self absorbed youths and their day to day travails. MTV does seem to have ratcheted up the sex appeal of the show a few more notches by filling the cast with good looking babes and hard bodied guys. They also appear to be encouraging romantic relationships among the cast members. Well, maybe relationships isn't the proper way to describe it as much as " hooking up".

Of course this can lead to added jealousy and friction between the roommates and on a recent episode it boiled over in a confrontation. One of the gals, Brynn, who had not successfully hooked up with the show's lead male hottie, Steven, despite numerous attempts, let her pent up frustration and envy get the best of her and whipped a fork at him in midst of an argument. It quickly escalated from there and while he verbally lashed her pretty good she took it to another level by physically pushing him.

At this point the combatants were separated and the other roommates tried to cool them off. Steven was understandably quite upset and demanded that Brynn be banished from the show for her action. He made an excellent point that had the situation been reversed and it was he who had pushed her he would likely already be out on the bricks. His roommates attempted to pacify him and tried to convince him to at least sleep on it for the night before calling for such drastic action. But he would have none of it and insisted that she get the boot.

Now, for the benefit of those of you unfamiliar with the show let me explain that if one of the seven roommates is guilty of wrong doing the other roommates can vote to have that person removed from the show. It has happened a couple of times in past episodes. Now in this particular situation two of the roommates had squared off against each other and one had clearly crossed the line. The aggrieved Steven wanted Brynn, the aggressor, tossed off the show while Brynn apologized and wanted to remain.

Perfect I thought. You have the accused, the victim, and five somewhat objective bystanders. The other roommates can be the jury and they can decide Brynn's fate. Well silly old me. I had forgotten just how deeply moral relativism had pervaded the thinking of this generation of youth. Instead of stepping in and being willing to make a judgment of the incident and decide the consequences that would result from it each and every one of the other roommates abdicated their responsibility by claiming that "We can't decide because we weren't the ones it happened to. We weren't in Steven's shoes so we don't know how he feels." God help us all. Actually God help those who find themselves on either side in a criminal case where folks like these may be on the jury.