Let us not mince words. The scenes at the recent 'Jade Star' fan event—where glass doors imploded under the weight of a mob desperate for a selfie with a social media personality—are not merely a failure of event security. They are a mirror held up to a society that has abandoned the virtues of restraint, dignity, and public safety for the cheap thrills of digital-age idolatry.
One is reminded of the bread and circuses of late Rome, or the jostling crowds at a Victorian public execution. The difference being that our ancestors at least had the excuse of barbarism or poverty. We have no such alibi.
We have only the vacuous cult of celebrity and a regulatory apparatus that seems designed to react after the bodies pile up. The safety standards urged by pundits today are the same standards that should have been mandatory yesterday, last year, and a decade ago. But we wait.
We wait until glass shards rain down on teenagers before we wring our hands. This is not a failure of policy. It is a failure of national character.
We have become a nation that celebrates the transient and ignores the eternal. We build our events like paper temples and are shocked when the wind blows. The only remedy is a return to a culture that values order over excitement, substance over spectacle.
But that would require something our age despises: thought before feeling. And so we will continue to pick up the pieces, both literal and metaphorical, until the next shattering reminder that decadence has consequences.
