Temporary Title

Feb. '12

Come on, North America. We can do better than this. It seems like every country in the Middle East is throwing a kick-ass riot every week. Deposing leaders. Overthrowing regimes. The kind of civil disobedience that Henry David Thoreau could get behind.

Not to sound like a grumpy old man, but what exactly do people hope to accomplish with a post-Super Bowl display of violence? Do people really, for one moment, think that if they flip over enough cars, the referees will retroactively declare a pass interference penalty on Tom Brady’s last second Hail Mary throw and reconvene the Giants and Patriots for one last snap? That’s dumb. If you think that, then you’re a dummy. And if you’re rioting for any other reason, then you’re also a dummy.

We, as a nation, are becoming the boy who rioted wolf. Part of the failure of the Occupy movement is that it couldn’t even generate the same amount of turmoil that a Red Sox World Series victory entails. The success of a riot isn’t the amount of storefronts demolished or the number of civilians cut down by rubber bullets. It’s the efficacy in forcing a larger group to take notice of a problem that they can then mobilize against.

Flipping a car after a sporting event to commemorate a loss is like knocking over a tombstone to protest the death of a grandparent. It doesn’t help, and it ruins someone else’s property. Instead of going totally bananas over things we can’t change, let’s pick our battles and make every tear gas grenade count.

Come on, people. We need to riot smarter, not harder.

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Fight For Your Riots by Josh Gondelman, [on the UMass Amherst Superbowl Riots] (via neonspandex)

I agree entirely, and I am just so fucking sick of the idiot drunks/jocks/others in Southwest who drag the name of my university through the fucking mud. I work hard to do well in a great engineering program that no one ever hears about because to most, UMass = ZooMass. No, I don’t party 4 days a week. No, I don’t riot after every mildly significant event. No, I don’t have any crazy stories of shenanigans in the dorms. I do work, I hang out with my friends, I have fun without causing property damage and noise complaints.

But that is never what people expect to hear. And riots like the one on Sunday just make it worse.

(Source: iseekmygreatperhaps)