You can't stop this "knockout game" with words. At least, you can't do it with words alone and not with kind or reasoned words of any kind. It must be met with violence. First, violence of the mind. Then violence of the body. Here's the plan.
Step 1: Dehumanize
The first thing we need to do is start denigrating the people who play this game. We need a national media campaign to paint them as the animals they are. These aren't young punks trying to deal with surplus adrenaline by picking a fight with another male of fighting age. These are worthless little pukes picking on women and the elderly.
There should be nowhere for them to run from the message. Nowhere to hide. Everywhere they go, there should be billboards, marquees, and television advertisements shaming them and reinforcing one message: you are nothing - not even the lowest level of person - if you play this game against a woman, a child, or an old person.
The goal is not just to demonize these people in the eyes of others but to dehumanize them in their own mind. People who play the knockout game in its present day form should be allowed to ego nor any measure of self esteem. They need to be put in a place of utter despair. They need to be willing to do anything - anything at all - in order to prove that they are not animals but men.
Step 2: Retaliate
Since kids - and it appears most people in general - are pretty stupid and easily swayed by the media, step 1 should turn their behavior a little. Some of them will probably still choose the wrong targets but, hopefully, the culture of shame and humiliation will rob them of their will to live. I'd like to see less kids killing themselves because they are gay and more killing themselves because they played the knockout game.
Some, however, will still want to play the game and will feel they have something to prove. They will attack other men. This is where the hard work starts. I know it sounds crazy but, when they attack us because we are men of fighting age, we have to actually be men.
People who assault others on the street for no apparent reason must be dealt with. That does't mean the cops get called. That doesn't mean a gun gets pulled. It also doesn't mean a single punch to the face or a little smacking around.
We need anchormen frozen with the chill of what they see. We need mothers on the news collapsing to their knees and weeping when they discover what their child did and what happened to them as a result. We need follow up stories months after attacks about the occasional knockout game player beating the odds and being transferred from the hospital into the county jail to await trial.
We need to teach the people playing this game that they still have something to lose and that the pain of playing the game is far greater than the pain of whatever fleeting angst they might be experiencing.
Step 3: Reprogram
The final step is to start teaching children to police themselves. Juvenile humans are vicious, especially to other children. We simply need to point that viciousness in another direction. We need to re-align the culture of our schools so that people who attack random strangers are seen as different. There's nothing that brings down the righteous fury of the masses like being different.
When I was a kid, schools made a practice of singling out children with certain attributes. If you were exceptionally bright or artistically talented, there were structures in place to make sure everyone knew you were different. This led to years of torture and many children tried to conform in order to fit in to the crowd. Not me, but a lot of kids.
While this property of schools has traditionally been used for evil - as nothing more than a mechanism for small people to manipulate other small people into punishing the exceptional - I believe it can be used for good. By the end of phase 2, acts of random violence should be cut down pretty close to the minimum. Only the really broken kids would still be conducting them - the real "seed of evil" types.
The final stage is to identify these people early and sick the masses on them while they are young. The pressure to fit in should drive many of them to try and conform which, in this case, means not playing the knockout game. Those few who still engage in the behavior will serve as reminders of what happens when you threaten the fabric of society. Better still: it's the truly evil kids being sacrificed to this cause, which is no real sacrifice at all.
If this plan is executed, the knockout game will cease to be a game. It will lose its name. It will instead be called what it really is: random acts of violence by misguided and defective teens.
Of course, it never will, so none of this really matters but I enjoyed writing it and, if even one person scolds a knockout game player as they run by because of this post, then I've made a difference.
