Netflix's Bird Box has been the source of much entertainment over the last month, the movie itself has been a hit on Netflix, it's the source of an endless stream of memes, and it spawned the Bird Box Challenge, in which people try to accomplish various and sundry tasks while blindfolded. However, as is often the case, some people have been taking the fun and games too far and now police officials have to get involved in order to remind everybody that driving while blindfolded is a bad idea. In a statement the Layton Police Department said...
Obviously, don't drive blindfolded or purposely impair yourself like that. But our bigger message is with any of these challenges that seem to go viral, we encourage young people especially to really give some thought as to how you're going about doing these challenges. Just do it in a different way. Don't do it in a way that's going to jeopardize people.
You'd think this would be one of those things that people wouldn't need official police statements in the Washington Post to realize, and yet, here we are. Police departments from Utah to Kansas to Maine have all responded to a recent case in which a 17-year-old attempted to accomplish the Bird Box challenge from behind the wheel of a car by asking people not to drive while blindfolded. You know, for safety.
Bird Box stars Sandra Bullock and deals with a world in which people are confronted by a monster that drives you to suicide if you see it. This results in the dwindling population resorting to living their lives blindfolded in order to avoid seeing the creature.
The story has also been picked up by other police departments around the country, resulting in statements on social media telling people not to follow suit.
On the one hand, you'd think that after an accident takes place nobody would need to be told not to drive while blindfolded, but then, you'd think the accident part wouldn't have been actually necessary first.
This is after Netflix had already asked people to play it safe when it came to accomplishing the Bird Box Challenge. Feel free to try to walk around your house trying to find crashing into the table. Maybe driving or walking across busy streets is a less smart idea.
Hopefully, anybody who was contemplating something like this will take these warnings to heart and just skip the idea. The big issue with doing something like driving while blindfolded isn't that you could hurt yourself, it's that you could hurt somebody else. That should be a decent rule of thumb when trying to accomplish any viral challenge (or just living life in general). If your idea has the potential to harm anybody other than you, do something else. If it has the potential to harm only you, maybe reconsider again.
Bird Box has been out on Netflix for almost a month, which means social media will probably be moving on to the new hotness soon, whatever that is. Of course, since Netflix will always have the movie available, there's the potential for more people finding it again and again and this becoming a challenge that never dies.
