September 19, 2007
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Florida Incident
Here are the video accounts of the incident:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=lpMSNjXhhhg
http://youtube.com/watch?v=tCBcOQkUNjI
http://youtube.com/watch?v=V8ndctwAJmU
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6bVa6jn4rpE
http://youtube.com/watch?v=lg9qTD6Z7zEMy first thought upon seeing one of these videos was that this couldn’t possibly be real. But apparently it was as no evidence has surfaced to refute any of it. So now I just think it’s just totally surreal.
I’ve been at many a speech where during the Q&A session people have asked much more belligerent and offensive questions and have taken up far more microphone time than this student did and they don’t even get their mic’s cut, let alone get escorted out of the facility. The speaker just answered the question. This guy speaks for about a minute and 30 seconds total, hardly the end of the world. Would he have gone on had his microphone not been cut? Perhaps. We can’t really know what would have happened. But he did telegraph earlier that he had ’2 more questions’ and he was just finishing up his second question which suggests strongly that he was almost done speaking and had the authorities waited but 20 seconds more he probably would have sat down and listened to the answer with no problems. Had he said after that something like “Oh and actually I’ve got three or four more questions I want to ask” and then kept going then I might see the argument that he is being overly disruptive. But really his speech seemed pretty darn tame to me.
What a strangely repressive educational environment. I could not imagine going to school there and I cannot imagine what on earth the person who ordered that student removed could have possibly been thinking. He must have been a really uptight stickler for the rules or just some kind of an idiot or both. He should have known better though. And the results of having all this all over thew news and youtube was totally predictable. He should have been thinking about that before he decided to have the cops act.
There must be more to this story than meets the eye. There’s got to be something else. My guess is that the school must have had their eye on this student for some other reason, like he had a history of being disruptive and that caused them to preemptively overreact. But even so that wouldn’t justify these grotesque acts.
The police also should have easily been able to predict the students belligerent reaction to being escorted out. Having all those cameras on him, and being who he was, the student was obviously going to try and make a scene. They should have been prepared for it and acted accordingly. After cutting his mic they should have calmly talked to him before laying a hand on him telling him that they intend to escort him out if that was indeed their intent. Maybe the student would have just said that he would shut up and sit down rather than be escorted out and that would have been the end of it. Grabbing him and leading him out just gave him the excuse to fight back and caused the situation to quickly spiral out of control and lead to the student needing to be arrested. But even with things getting out of control there was still no rational justification for tasing an entirely subdued student who is causing no risk to anyone but just being a little too loud. I mean really did they think he was going to get away somehow? How many policemen were there? Where was he gonna go?
It’s all so dumb, with his Mic cut the forum would have gone on just fine with Kerry answering the question even if the authorities had done nothing at all. The audience obviously didn’t care what the student was doing. They were virtually ignoring him up until the point where he started to seem to be the victim. They were all there to listen to Kerry.
And although I think its great that Kerry did go ahead and answer the student’s question, I wish he had done more to stand up for the rights of the student being arrested. Sure he didn’t have any authority to interfere in the school’s business, but this is a person who wanted to be leader of the most powerful nation in the world. He should have made it his business anyway. He should have been willing and able to interject himself into the situation and diffuse it *before* any harm was done to anyone. Or at least he should have tried. That’s the kind of person I would want to be President. I guess Kerry isn’t it. But then I’d still prefer Kerry to Bush.
A quick note on the news coverage. The Fox News account was deeply disturbing to me. They twist the incident to make it look exactly like they want it to. The MSNBC account was ok but they should have put in more of the students comments so that the viewer would have the context to understand the circumstances and the joke about “the most excited anyone has ever been” was just in bad taste and should have been left out of the segment.
Anyway, by and large this sort of story really makes me sick.
