So here's my beef... this is what it looked like when the UNC Tarheels upset #3 ranked U. Miami on Saturday:
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| ...kids rushing the field, taking down the goalposts, high-fiving and loving life. I got to do this when Syracuse beat Georgetown (basketball), it's a whole lot of fun. | |
Now HERE's what it looked like when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 long, painful years: | |
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My question is this: do we live in a freakin' police state? This looks like footage from guerilla uprising revolts in third world countries. I mean seriously, WTF??? On Wednesday night, after the Sox won, we streamed out of Kinvara on Harvard Ave. and started to high-five people in the streets, including people driving by slowly in their cars, honking their horns. A cop told me to get out of the street and that he wouldn't warn me again. Of course, everyone is still in the street high-fiving people in cars, so I go back out there and the cop grabs me, pins me up against Herrell's and threatens to put me in jail, daring me to say "one word." I'm drunk of course, grinning wildly and DYING to say something smart ass, but eventually I just ask, goofily, "What jail?" and he growls, "MY JAIL!!" Ok buddy... do you get your stuff from Bonds or Sheffield, you meathead? Anyway, I imagine they were told to isolate the rabble-rousers and make examples out of them, but come on... me? ME? What, cuz I have a pony tail? Jaysis, I just wanted to high-five my fellow Bostonians! Then of course, there was the parade fiasco, which, I guess in an effort to curb the city's drinking, started at 10am (??!) and never featured any sort of speeches by the players or anything. After the parade went by, we all ducked into a bar on Bolyston St. Less than 20 minutes later, the cops came in to shut it down, along with all the other bars on Boylston. ?! Good idea to urge 5,000 people to chug their beers and take to the streets again. And if I was a bar owner I'd be LIVID! They were making thousands of dollars. So basically, my beef is that Menino and the Boston Police (who shot and killed an innocent student in this martial law effort to enforce "public safety" ...God that sickens me) all but ruined what should have been two of the greatest times of our lives as Bostonians and Red Sox fans. Not only that, they deprived local businesses of just that, business, much like their treatment of the DNC when people were afraid to even come into the city. I know Menino's well-respected and working on his 3rd term, but come on... this is a college town, and in college, when your team wins, you celebrate, and hug strangers, and drink and have fun. Yeah, sometimes people will get hurt. But better that someone climbing a goalpost-- or a green monster-- falls and hurts himself out of his own stupidity than the enforcing police officers on duty shoot into a crowd of kids and kill someone. Ugh. I'll end by saying that obviously some cops are great people. After the incident Wednesday night, with the macho dickhead on Harvard Ave., I talked to an older cop outside Kinvara who was drinking his coffee and kind of soaking in the scene, and really down to earth. Fully prepared to intervene if anything happened, but letting people enjoy themselves in the meantime. We need more guys like him. | |