the YouTube generation

"Crowd cheers suicidal jumper to his death
JEERING onlookers goaded a teenager in Britain to jump to his death, undermining police efforts to talk him down, and then took pictures of the body.

Yesterday as 17-year-old Shaun Dykes prepared to jump from the top of a multi-storey carpark in Derby, northern England, spectators allegedly shouted to him: "How far can you bounce?", the UK's MailOnline reports.

As Dykes hesitated for three hours on the ledge while police unsuccessfully tried to reason him out of taking his life, teenagers who had gathered below shouted "Jump" and "Get on with it", according to police and witnesses.

Then after Dykes lay in a crumpled heap on the pavement the same hecklers rushed out from behind the police cordon to take photos of the body"

This afternoon, at work I was about to leave when the two young guys I work with urged me to stay a moment and listen to a segment on the local radio station, something called "wind up your wife".
So I stayed, and listened for a few minutes.
The segment today consisted of one of the announcers ringing up a South African immigrant's wife and pretending to be from the Immigration Dept.
The woman had a very young child and the husband had previously told the two yobs running the segment that their baby's visa had run out due to an oversight.
So the "immigration officer" harassed the woman, telling her that the baby was booked on a deportation flight the next day and when she protested that she was breastfeeding--almost hysterical with rage and worry by now--the scumbag told her "not to worry, we've made arrangements for the baby to be fed on the flight."
The two I work with were grinning and really enjoying this appalling exhibition and they assured me that the segment had been known to have wind-ups "much better than that".
I left, unable to bear to listen to any more of what was no less than torture for entertainment.
Sickened and sad and depressed, that this kind of behaviour is now absolutely unremarkable, that two otherwise seemingly decent young people could regard that disgusting display of cruelty and arrogant abuse of trust as entertainment.
And you know what, my friends? I don't believe this is at all unusual. We now have a couple or more generations of young people to whom words such as honour and decency and integrity are no more than an excuse to take the piss, to poke fun at the society that nurtured them and supports them still.
These "people" would destroy--or allow to be destroyed--the very structure which provides their way of life, and they're too arrogant, too ignorant, too blinkered and too selfish to know what they do.
God help us.