bum fights

In this place, where all things are opinion and rarely based in provable fact, I offer this....

At this time, I would like to talk about the hilarious nature of watching video footage of homeless drunks fighting each other for the amusement of well-fed, very bored, voyeur-sadists such as myself. I cry, FOUL! Not that the tapes exist, or that such a brutal incident occured, it's that there is a faction of our society that has worked very, very hard and spent millions and millions of dollars and countless legal months, trying to put an end to these films. While we sit and enjoy the brutality in the comfort of our homes, there are those among us that cry out, "Enough! This is wrong and it should be stopped!" Of course, these people are the same people that do little to nothing towards the improvement of the habitat in which our gladiators hail from. Can we wave our fingers at the perpetrators, and not have to have the finger waved at us for our own neglectful nature? Dare I ask, which is more sadistic in it's nature? The person paying a homeless person to fight, thus giving them employment OR the person that denies the homeless person a dollar when asked for it on the street?

The Bum fight organization is the brain-child of a fairly young group of amateur fighting enthusiasts and film makers. It came to them, much like the Reece's Peanut Butter Cup people, that they loved watching people fight and they loved bums just as much and, wouldn't it be neat if we could mix the two together somehow and enjoy them both together. The problem, it seemed, was how to find two bums that were willing to fight each other without knowing the bums, their history or their attitude toward violence. How does one convince a bum to fight another bum without a reason? Hmmmmmm..... I GOT IT! We'll offer them money.

This plan worked like gang busters and the fights were on. All the young fight and film lovers had to do was find homeless people that would put up their dukes and smile for the camera. Enter: the mean streets of your town, USA. It took less than two hours to find a massive group of would-be star brawlers for their films. The carnage of the first night was legendary in the fight-film world.

The fights were brutal. Not in the average way in which a sober, emotional person might fight. No, these fights had an edge. These gladiators had something else... You could call it... a hunger. Something that drove these extraordinary men beyond the limits of any normal man and it made for great cinema.

Drunks when sober, are meaner people, which is why they drink. They are doing their part to keep the peace in our society. Some sober people are meaner drunks and so the drunks do what they can to drink all available booze to prevent the onslaught of unneeded violence from the violent drunks. Drunks, it would seem, are modern day saints. And we spit on them and cast them aside. We never give them money when they ask us for it and we are always disgusted by their presence in our world. They are a blueberry stain on the wedding dress of our lives. They are a reminder to us that our perfect "vision" of the world, is just a lie. They remind us that there is something wrong with our own madness.

Bumfights brings value back to vagrancy and allows you to keep the perception of your world as perfect. If these bums are working, then the world IS perfect.

"Even the homeless play a part in our perfectly balanced world" YES, I said it!!! Now let the words ring out in the valley for all to hear.

Bums can fight. They fight for money which brings them what they so desperately want: Booze. They have cast aside all the common illusions that everyone carries with them of being famous, rich, healthy, sexy or "of being a part of something" or "making a difference". They know they are just another monkey in the zoo and all they want from life is their simple bliss - fermented anything. They know better than any of us that death finds us all and their death will be just as traumatic as any you will find in a sanitary home a few miles down the road. They know that it's money that will pay for the things that make them happy until they die, and they are not interested in a complicated list of "happinesses". Your list is long, conflicting, unorganized, stressful and a burden. (take a moment to think of all the things that make you happy and how easy that list is to achieve on a daily basis) Their list is short. They don't need four hundred rolls of toilet paper stored in a new hand made oak cabinet. They don't need salad dressing on the side, or all twenty seven ESPN channels, or memory foam pillows. They don't need everything to be perfect on a family holiday get together. They just need booze. And if some kid walks up to them and says, "twenty bucks to fight that guy" then you had better believe that the bum is going to throw down. They know at the end of that fight is the sweet nectar of life that will erase the pain in their jaw.

Bum fights is under investigation and the web site is gone. You can find the tapes of the fights here and there, but they are mostly memory. Today, the new trend is for groups of bored, disillusioned teens that used to pay bums to fight, to go out, find a homeless person and beat them to death. Not a very square deal for the bum in my estimation. But that's the price we pay when we start to strip down the rawness of life. We act appalled at the sociopathic tendency of these kids but fail to realize that our own treatment of the bums is just as cruel, if not more so. At least the pack of wolves ended it quickly. Had we left the kids alone, the bums would be alive, sauced and you wouldn't be bothered by them on the news or on the street, thus allowing you to live in your vision of happiness and perfection without being reminded of its darker side.