SOUNDING OFF:

Like most residents of Newport-Mesa, this week I read with great distress the articles reporting the beating administered to a young female Horace Ensign Middle School student by two freshman girls from Newport Harbor High School — an event that was recorded by another girl while a fourth stood and watched the beating.

The video of the event apparently was uploaded to YouTube and advertised on MySpace.

I’ve read the blog comments in this newspaper and others, most of which call for extreme penalties for the girls in question, including the two who recorded the event and didn’t try to stop it.

Others called for sanctions on the parents of the girls. I understand all those emotions. What I don’t understand is why this happened.

Over the past few years I’ve observed a general coarsening of our society, particularly in our youth. I live not too far from where this event occurred and might even recognize the girls in question.

I frequently have lunch at a local fast food outlet where kids from Ensign and Harbor hang out after school. Until recently it wasn’t much of a problem — kids showed up, sat, ate, laughed and talked then left.

Granted, the volume of the conversations went up, but that was about it.

Today, things are different. Today, the kids are much more rowdy and disrespectful.

Over the past several months they’ve devolved from kids chatting and having fun to being thugs intent on creating chaos. They not only disrupt other patrons, but actually destroy property — breaking up trays and crushing salt and pepper shakers, for example.

A perfect example of this devolution occurred just recently, when one of these young miscreants had a beef with some of his friends in the restaurant. As he angrily left to get his ride home with his mother he knocked over a row of bicycles parked just outside the door.

An older patron who had witnessed the hassle inside and was leaving out the same door scolded him for knocking the bikes over and suggested he should pick them up.

He turned on her, glared at her and called her a name normally reserved for a female dog. Stunned and offended, she followed him to his mother’s car and told her what happened. One can only hope he received some significant punishment.

I’m not surprised at the beating and its posting on the Internet — it’s a symptom of the times in which we live, and I don’t much like it.

I like even less the assumption by some blog posters that the perpetrators were Latinas. No mention of the ethnicity of the girls — the beaters or the beaten — has been mentioned in the local newspapers.

Even more disturbing, but not surprising, is the knee-jerk reaction by one influential man in town who operates his own blog and whose commentaries occasionally appear on these pages.

As soon as the story broke he immediately posted a blog entry in which he referred to alleged comments by blog posters that postulated that the perpetrators were white and, according to him, were anti-white hate speech.

Well, I read all the comments posted on local newspaper blogs, and no such comments existed — he just made it up, apparently to support his own pro-white, anti-Latino bias and further inflame racial tensions in our city.

Sadly, this also is a sign of our times.

GEOFF WEST is a resident of Costa Mesa.