On Civil Disobedience

The Keene Pumpkin Festival takes place every year during the cool days of October. Held in the town of Keene, NH, it often draws tourists and visitors from around the state. What goes on is self-explanatory; there is a festival in which pumpkins are shown, displayed, carved and eaten. However, this year, as many of you at Exeter may have already heard, a riot broke out during the festival.The riot was composed primarily of students from Keene State College, which is an hour and a half away from Exeter. The entire school has a little over five thousand students. Riots broke out along the pumpkin festival as the gala progressed into the day. These riots involved mostly Keene State students who were fired up from partying, dancing and, most importantly, consuming vast amounts of alcohol. The inebriated students, boisterous and noisy, were out to cause mischief and ended up starting a riot at an otherwise amicable festival.Can you notice everything wrong with what I just said?If any of you thought that the beginning of this editorial seemed bland and CNN-esque, you’re perfectly right. After all, wasn’t this just another teenage riot? An occasion in which a large group of students drank too much beer and smashed up a festival, erupting into "raucous and raunchy" behavior? Those "clowns" who threw stones and turned over cars will be reprimanded soon for their irresponsible actions and return to the school as students, right? It’s just like "Project X!"But when vandalism and destruction of property occurs for the sake of avenging an unarmed black teenager that was shot by the police, perceptions shift and descriptions change. Boisterous and noisy turns into animal impulses, raucous teenagers turn into thugs and mischief turns into destruction. The teenagers in Keene threw empty beer bottles and stones randomly into crowds, kicked down stop signs and turned over random cars. The dangers that they posed to the innocent and to the bystanders of Keene were just as great as the danger that rioters in Ferguson posed to their small Missouri town. One case is perceived as a minor party-fueled racket. The other is seen as civil disobedience, unwarranted violence that was destroying a community.The difference in motives was just as great as the difference in media descriptions. Although violence is never justified, the riots that broke out in Ferguson at least had some sort of cause; in response to an act of police brutality, specifically the assault on a black teenager. It was a rage in a much deeper, more violent context—in a world where black teenagers are killed at a rate 21 times greater than that of white youth. What happened a hundred miles west of us manifested into something movie-like that we found hard to take seriously, because they were "just partying."To show just how frequently this occurs and how insignificant it seems to all of us, I am going to tell you about another riot. Not of one that happened a few weeks or a few months ago—riots broke out in Morgantown, WV on the same exact day, and for an equally ridiculous reason as the pumpkin riot—university students rioted after a football game. Parties after a WVU victory over Baylor on the football field turned into street fires, lampposts being pulled down and flying glass bottles and rocks.These acts of civil disobedience underline a problem ingrained in our society rooted much deeper than the images of riot police or lobbed tear gas canisters. While students at Keene State threw broken glass at policemen and students at Morgantown lit fires across town, Michael Brown had simply raised his hands in surrender. While the students were told to leave and a few were arrested and suspended, Michael Brown was shot six times. Fixing these problems will require, first, for our perceptions to change; and with the way that each and every one of these events are portrayed and talked about so differently in the news and on television, that alone will be a very difficult thing to do.