The eye in the sky is watching

At one point or another, just about every one of us has done something deserving of regret later on.

Somewhere along the way, people are bound to break a law, offend a custom or commit a faux pas. People make mistakes, and people pay the price for those mistakes.

Sometimes, those mistakes are captured on video. And those are the type of mistakes that linger.

Just ask Ray Rice.

It was bad enough when news of the punch he delivered to his fiancee at the time came out. At the time, some were calling for a four-game suspension of Rice to match the framework of the NFL’s drug policy. He wound up with a two-game suspension, although commissioner Roger Goodell promised reform of the league’s personal conduct rules.

Then the video came out. It was, in a word, ugly. The video didn’t just show a punch; it was a full-on knockout.

Rice -- as well as the Baltimore Ravens and the league office -- should have known that his punch would be caught on video. The incident took place in a casino. Do we need to dig out the quote from Robert De Niro’s character from “Casino” about who is watching whom? Even in elevators, there are cameras. And as we found out when the video was leaked, the eye in the sky was watching.

Locally, an incident involving video has brought negative attention to Friday’s Lamar County-Mary Persons football game.

The short version of the story, according to Michael A. Lough’s story from Thursday’s Telegraph, is that some teenagers made a video of a Lamar County hoodie being set on fire as part of an effort to stoke the rivalry. And, yes, the video was posted online.

If anything, the video falls under the category of teenagers making a bad decision, a 21st-century take on pregame rivalry activity going over the top.

Stunts like that -- as negative as they are -- have always been part of high school football. I’ve heard of worse things happening in other places.

But when that kind of activity finds its way online, where anonymity goes out the window and a record of the event is created, it’s a game-changer.

Before social media, this sort of thing would have carried a short shelf life, maybe a week or two, tops. Once that video was posted online, however, there was a permanent record created. Sure, the creator or site manager can pull it down, but that doesn’t wipe it from existence.

The Mary Persons players involved -- head coach Brian Nelson didn’t name them, and they don’t need to be named here -- have been subjected to internal discipline.

I’m not trying to call out the Mary Persons community here, or anyone in particular, for that matter. Something like this could happen at any school, and it likely has at a good number of schools around the country. But there is a lesson in all of this: Don’t do anything on camera that you would not want a present or future employer, significant other, offspring or other relative to see, either now or 20 years into the future.

After this week, that point should be painfully clear.

Contact Ron Seibel at 744-4222 or rseibel@macon.com

This story was originally published September 11, 2014 at 6:19 PM with the headline "The eye in the sky is watching ."