IT WAS quite an expensive lesson for the three nurses who used to work at the Tuburan District Hospital.
“Used to” because they were recently fired after they took a video of a suspected drug personality who had been shot several times during a police operation and then uploaded the whole thing on social media.
They were held liable for violating the Data Privacy Act.
Until now, I’m still trying to figure out how they managed to just stand there and watch a bloodied man writhe in agony. Because I couldn’t.
I had a chance to watch the video that went viral, but after three seconds I turned it off. I didn’t understand what I felt but I knew I couldn’t continue watching. It wasn’t so much as nerve-wracking but it was definitely cringeworthy.
First of all, I had no intention of watching a man in the throes of death. And he was because he reportedly died an hour after the video was taken.
So why would anyone want to watch something like that? Or better yet, why would someone want to record something like that?
Apparently, people have a strange fascination with all things morbid.
According to www.womenshealth.mag, it’s all about the urge for reassurance.
“It’s natural that when you hear of something awful happening to another person, you put yourself in his or her shoes. Imagine dealing with an unthinkably scary situation immediately compels you to figure out all the details—so you can convince yourself that you would never end up in that situation,” the article said.
So the people who watched the district hospital video wanted reassurance that what happened the drug suspect couldn’t happen to them because they were safer than that. I mean, that’s what Matthew Goldfine, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in New York and New Jersey, said in the article, anyway.
But Goldfine didn’t see the video.
After all, there’s a difference between looking at an already dead body and watching someone who is very much alive covered in blood and visibly in pain.
During the investigation, one of the nurses told Gov. Hilario Davide III and Provincial Health Office Chief Rene Catan that she took the video for “record purposes.”
“For them, they did it to determine who this person is because he was brought in with the police and they did not know him so they recorded,” Catan said.
So why then upload the video on social media? Is it because almost everybody else is doing it? They have their smart phones with built-in cameras and look, a bloodied guy on the hallway, let’s take a video.
It’s almost like deriving pleasure from someone else’s suffering.
You know, the Germans have a word for that.