“Stolen Sidekick”: Moral Endeavor

morality
morality

The story about the “Stolen sidekick” concerning Sasha Gomez and Evan Guttman was a moral fight for Evan.  Evan’s friend was the owner of a sidekick phone and she happened to leave it in a taxi by accident.  After Evan’s friend bought a new sidekick, she logged into the data from her old phone and was able to see the person’s info of who had her phone. She was able to see the girl’s pictures from MySpace, which also had pictures of her baby and boyfriend. Evan then used the info from Sasha’s messenger account to get into contact with her and to ask her to return the phone. Sasha refused in a rude way, and this started the morality fight between Evan and Sasha.Evan was able to see all of this info regarding Sasha and dished it out to the public through his page online. Evan said on his online page on the third update “This is not a religious endeavor or a moral endeavor”, but I think it did turn into a moral lesson he wanted to teach Sasha and her family. In the early stages of the webpage Evan claims his goal of the webpage was, “I want these people SHAMED into realizing what they have done”, but towards the end of the webpage we see the truth of what his objective was.

To anyone who read “It takes a village to find a phone” or heard its summary, it would be easy to classify Evan as white man that was being a bully or a racist towards a minority puertorican teenage girl. However when you really find out the background of Evan, you start to see this is actually a moral endeavor for him, to Sasha and her family.  Evan tells a life story on his webpage of when he was in the 7th grade and he went with a couple of friends to the river, and they thought it would be fun to light some leaves. They thought this was a good idea since the leaves were by the river, but the fire ended up getting out of control and burning a private house. Evan and his friends were arrested and his parents had to cover the liability cost. For the next 3 months Evan had to visit burn victims in the hospital, and he was banned from seeing the friends. Even though the act by Evan and his friends were innocent and not malicious, it was wrong and destructive and he had to pay the consequences for them, despite his age. Evan learned from this young age that it is not alright to do wrong, no matter what your age is.

Evan had no initial intentions of embarrassing Sasha and her family, he actually made a deal with them from the start of the webpage all the  way to Sasha’s arrest, that as soon as she returned the phone, the webpage was coming down. When Sasha, her brother, and mother, all knew who the stolen phones owner was, yet still denied pleads from the owner to give the phone back, this I think fueled Evans desire to make them do the right thing. Evan, I think, saw his naive young self in Sasha, when he was a boy that didn’t think about the responsibility , despite his youth to do the right thing. His parents were the ones that didn’t allow him to run away from his responsibility of doing right, which one can argue, changed his life for the better. Evan in return wanted to force Sasha to understand her responsibility of doing right, especially since the adults around her weren’t teaching her this important life lesson. In the beginning of his webpage, Evan didn’t realize his drive was a moral endeavor to Sasha and her family that no one is to young to do right.

 

I thought Evans intentions were good when he started the webpage just to help a friend find her phone, but when his personal feelings started getting involved, is when I think his intentions got screwed up. It was not Evans fault that his webpage about Sasha got so much attention, put he did have an unfair advantage against Sasha and he misused it. With Evan having a great background of computer knowledge, he was able to paint a bad picture of Sasha for the whole world to see, while Sasha wasn’t as computer savvy as Evan to defend her image. There was also a huge age difference with Sasha being 16, while Evan was 31! In todays society if a 31 year old man was bullying physically a 16 year old girl, even if the girl was in the wrong, it would never be acceptable. I don’t see why it is acceptable for Evan to do such, just because it is online, even if he didn’t like her morals. It is not his place to try and force Sasha to change her ways especially since he is not a relative or friend of hers. If he didn’t like her morality then he has the right to tell her, but she has the right not to listen. Since Sasha didn’t listen to Evan’s advice, this is when I think Evan took the gesture personal and made a conscious effort to embarrass Sasha with the unfair technological advantage he had. This is his case I think was wrong.

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