A Somewhat Ironic Fight Broke Out In An Arkansas Steakhouse Because People Weren’t Appropriately Social Distancing

One of my go-to staples of blog content in my years around the industry has been fight videos. There’s something raw and primal about some dudes (or ladies) going mano a mano when captured on a shaky vertical camera. But with the pandemic, there have been less of these little Internet treasures floating around. So I thank the people of Arkansas for the above fight which began thanks to a social distancing agreement, according to KARK:

Seth Crews says he and his brother were eating dinner when they heard screams coming from the bar and that’s when he began recording.

“All the restaurant employees were trying to help, they were just in shock like the rest of us,” said Crews.

A police report obtained from the Little Rock Police Department says an employee with Saltgrass Steak House saw the woman wearing the mask in the video tell two others that they were sitting too close. The employee also says that the same woman was purposely coughing on other customers.

Both the report and witnesses indicate the man wearing the U-S-A shirt got even closer, further escalating the situation.

“The guy came up and was touching on his back and giving him a little shove and he just wasn’t taking it and that’s when it all started,” said Crews.

That is when the boyfriend of the woman wearing the mask is seen in the video hitting the other man with a bottle.

Part of the fun of these fight videos is figuring out how to unpack what happened. If we want to get inside baseball on fight videos, normally there’s an instigator you can identify from the video. That leads you to determine who’s the protagonist in the fight. Then you can determine if there’s some sort of karmic retribution from the fight’s ending or if it’s just the bad guy winning in the end.

But in this video, it kind of seems like everyone is wrong. The two people at the bar are wearing masks and clearly they’re concerned about the lack distancing inside in the restaurant. They’re also surrounded by people not wearing masks, a major risk for indoor eating (especially considering Arkansas has hit COVID highs within the last week-plus). Then you factor in that the masked people are allegedly coughing on people, a fruitless endeavor in the mask that we don’t see in the video. Then you factor in that one of the unmasked guys attempts to break up the fight while also not socially distancing. And you sprinkle in the fact that the unmasked people are wearing USA/’Murica type of shirts, and the fact that the masked dude straight up cracked a bottle over the other guy’s head (and violated the social distancing he craved in the process), and I’ve simply got no clue whom to root for here.

So I choose to root for everyone else in the bar who just wanted to eat a steak. I mean, can you imagine if this is your first night going out after months of quarantine and closures? You just want a nice rib eye done the right way because your significant other can’t get a good crisp on a steak, maybe some overly buttered mashed potatoes, and all of a sudden there are bottles being broken over people’s heads because idiots on both sides can somehow find a way to be wrong in how they handle the same issue in 2020?

Either way, I’m glad to get my fight video fix in before situations like this result in everything around the country closes down again. Now we need to focus on repairing the respect and love we have for steak that was so flagrantly violated here.

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