Riot On

Halloween Riot; Madison, Wisconsin; 2003

Read this first.

As my friend Machen said, this is all very sad and ridiculous.  I don't want to get in to how I feel about the whole Joe Paterno situation, suffice it to say I think anyone who thinks he has done enough just by telling on someone deserves whatever happens to them when the other shoe drops.  Ire-inducing as that whole mess is, at least it makes some kind of sense.

What doesn't make sense to me is a student body's desire to riot.  Are students jealous that their parents and grandparents got to take part in protests that were actually purposeful back in the '60s?  Imagine if at the end of the Penn State riots if the Board of Trustees came out and said to the mob "you guys have really gotten our attention.  You have made a valid point and expressed yourselves in a productive, mature way.  We are going to rehire Joe Paterno as the head coach of the football team."

After all that is what rioting is about, right?  Using violence to get what we want or to imply or dissatisfaction with the way things are.  Riots provoke change, in theory.  Perhaps a better lens through which to view rioting is that it is senseless aggression and hatefulness for its own sake.  College was/is a hard time in life.  Teenagers and early twenty-somethings are emotional lot prone to flights of whimsy and hysteria.  Ideas are put in to action before they are processed as good, bad, or neutral.  It's easy to see where the firing of lovable grandfather type would ignite negative feelings in the minds of the Penn State student body.  As those students learn how to integrate in to the world, an action like that could easily be construed as a reason to believe the world does not care about their opinions.  It could even be seen as a reason to distrust the world they are expected to become a part of.

Perhaps some of that is too grandiose, but if I don't allow myself to look at it that way it just makes my heart hurt.  Because the alternative is that people are by nature maniacal, cruel, and irrational; and that just makes me sad for those rioting and those of us who have to witness the rioting.  I'd rather believe that the Penn State student body was just being a bunch of kids who didn't know any better.  Not that that makes me feel a lot better.

It all takes me back to my college days and the yearly Halloween riots that would take place in Madison.  Off the top of my head, I believe the first riot started because some girls on a balcony wouldn't show their breasts after they implied that they would.  Rioting because you didn't get to see naked boobs, or rioting because you feel your coach who knew of sexual abuse going on in his program was wrongly fired, which reason is better?

That first Halloween riot would be pathetic in its own right, but the fact that it sparked a yearly "tradition" is depressing.  They got worse every year I was in college until the city finally developed a proper gameplan that was rather fascist in its execution.  But I would rather feel safe celebrating a goofy holiday than feel like I need to tell every out of towner I see to not trash Jamba Juice this year.  My understanding is that things have died down in Madison over the years and are back to "normal"--whatever that means now.  

To me it is tragic things got away from the carefree way they used to be in the first place.  Life is hard enough without riots.