School Tase

We've all seen video of 21-year old Andrew Meyer getting Tasered by campus police at a John Kerry event in Florida this week. Everyone's got an opinion on this one, obviously. To be fair, Meyer cut the line then refused to get off the mic. He's possessed of a damn annoying voice and comes off more cheeky than serious. Really, he seems the kind of irritating asscock we all avoided in college. He did have a legitimate question, though, even if it was delivered in a manner more reminiscent of Gus, the unhinged vagrant living under the FDR Drive.

Then the police on that campus did what panicked, angry, poorly trained cops do all the time: they violently overreacted.

(Does anyone else find it ironic that he demanded to know why Kerry didn't stand up and question the results of the 2004 election, only to painfully learn what happens when you stand up and ask uncomfortable questions?)

As I watch the video, which is on YouTube in a variety of angles and running lengths, the most appalling thing of all is the audience of college students which does nothing to stop the cops or help Meyer in any way. In all the versions I’ve seen, I've heard only one voice of dissent: that of an off-camera woman asking, “Hey, what did he do?” A few audience members actually laugh at what they’re watching and, of course, there's the obligatory handful of ignorant fuckmonkeys who get out of their seats to get a better shot on their camera phones.

This is unbelievable to me. What was wrong with those kids down there? Have they been so brainwashed, so mind-fucked by the slow erosion of their rights in the last six years that they’ve got no sense when they’re being abused? Probably.

College students are pathetic. Apathetic. They're feeding like suckbirds on cynicism's bloated carcass. What does it take for a little righteous indignation to stir their Myspace-deadened hearts into action? Maybe their wireless connectivity needs to be embargoed first. Tom Hayden was quoted somewhere saying that if this had happened in his SDS days, it would have sparked an all-out riot. My own college days weren’t nearly as incendiary as his, but I sincerely believe -- even in the Reagan 80s -- there'd have been an angry scrum in my lecture hall if a fellow student took 300kV to the central nervous system just for being an outspoken douchebag.

Stupid fucking kids. I saw that the next day they held a “protest” on campus. Ah, good... lip service. Protests are so fucking easy. You can yell a little, stand around a lot, and then shoot a lot of video of each other yelling and standing around. Protests even fit conveniently into your already frantic collegiate schedule. You can fit one in between cramming for the Sociology exam and updating your blog. You might even leave early to beat the lines for custom Wiimote faceplates. Protesting is easy. Getting off your ass to intercede is hard. It requires getting… off… your… ass.

[posted with ecto]

On iTunes right now: Shake a Leg from the album Back In Black by AC/DC

Comments

[Heath]

Preach on.

"Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

[walein]

Colbert's "The Word" on that was "Solitarity." You should check out a clip of it.