Smile, you’re on candid camera and everyone sees you
When I was a kid, my family watched “Candid Camera,” a show where host Allen Funt would set up ordinary people in funny or frustrating situations and surreptitiously film them.
Customers at a photo studio discovered strangers in their family portraits. The chains on the pens at the bank were too short to enable writing.
The pranks were revealed with the show’s catchphrase, “Smile, you’re on ‘Candid Camera.’ ”
It was funny stuff.
After every episode, my dad would say that you could tell a lot about a person’s character by how they act when they think no one is watching.
These days, it seems someone is watching all the time. There are cameras everywhere — in our workplaces, on the freeway, even in doorbells and in our cellphones.
Often, those cameras catch people at their worst.
White people calling the cops on black people for ridiculous reasons. People treating others badly because of the language they speak, the color of their skin, their religion or their politics.
Moms who took children with them to grab stuff out of a Tempe mosque broadcast the incident themselves on Facebook. An Arizona lawmaker pulled over for speeding boasting to the officer that he regularly drives even faster.
None of this behavior is new, of course. What is relatively new is the ability to record it and instantly post it to social media.
With that in mind, you would think people would behave better.
As hard as these videos are to watch, they push these behaviors into our view so we can’t ignore it. In the same way, videos of police shootings sparked a national conversation about police conduct and race. There is accountability in these videos.
If what my dad said was true, we have a lot to learn from watching them.
It’s not a bit funny.