That Elusive Moment of Fame

"The burns penetrate the skin and soft tissue and then involve the muscle. As they penetrate you lose fluid, causing dehydration and it causes all these inflammatory markers that drop your blood pressure and can put you into shock." 
"[Recovery from the consequences can take years]."
Dr. Robert Glatter, emergency room physician,  Lennox Hill Hospital, New York

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Is it that people are just too idiotically dense to understand the consequences of actions they take? Or is it that young people cannot imagine that anything adverse will occur to them, because they are young and destined to live a long and fruitful life, irrespective of the choices they make? Or am I just expressing in different words the very same question?

Young people do want to be noticed, they do take challenges, they want to be accepted, to be admired, to be part of a clique, to be considered special enough that others will be eager to befriend them. But in the process do they and must they take total leave of their reasonableness, their common sense?

The allure of posting a stupid trick like this on YouTube is evidently too great a draw.

How else explain a 12-year-old attempting to perform a stunt that has become popular among young people? Are they trying to prove they're imbeciles by making the effort, or hoping to prove that they're invincible?

A boy in New York city spread flammable liquids on himself then lit a match and proceeded to set himself on fire. That was only part of the stunt. The rest of it was to leap into a bathtub filled with water, or a shower and that expeditiously planned solution to ensuring that the rubbing alcohol or nail polish remover he'd poured on himself was put out immediately for the "fire challenge" stunt to succeed.

This juvenile immaturity appears to have morphed into a craze across the United States involving both teens and pre-teens making the news at local news stations in their attempts to master the timing required, but lacking the cool split-second response to succeed.

Firefighters, in this instance, responded to a home in the Queens neighbourhood to discover the boy suffering serious burns over 40 percent of his body. Neighbours, alerted to the boy's situation when he ran out of his house, attempted to extinguish the fire with the water he had himself been unable to enlist in his aid.

It was all too late, unfortunately, to save him from serious burns, and he was taken to hospital in wretched condition.