please don't shoot the kids

This post is a work in progress, as I do not know all the facts and figures pertaining to the tasering of a student at UCLA during the week of November 13th 2006.

My first reaction is to think that we are living in a very different collegiate world than we did even a few years ago. Pre 09/11, and pre Patriot Act it was -- arguably -- still possible to think about the university as a counter-space, a utopian space. I have posted about this in the teachers with and without guns essay. I think it is clear with the tasering of Mr. Tabatabainejad that we can no longer lay claim -- even in theory -- to such a space. The university is in the process of becoming, if it hasn't become already, something like a shopping mall -- a seemingly public space where private and/or semi-public security forces do in fact have the legal right (I think) to demand identification and cooperation. and if you don't cooperate, god help you.

Notably, the student's response and that of many of the others there resembled the reactions of folks still operating in the utopian-post hippy mindset. How dare you and ooh those pigs and there goes your patriot act. the outrage is undoubtedly justified, but the responses feel to me -- oddly -- nostalgic, as though they were produced by a time-warp, and the students thought it was 1970 and not 2006. I think such outrage comes too late -- it's an anachronistic emotion -- this outrage, this defiance.

That being said, students, professors, and all staff who care, need to put pressure on their campuses not to shoot the students -- with bb guns, bows and arrows, tasers, or bullets. i think this needs to happen through allied student organizations, the union, and the faculty senate. You can't shoot the kids.

In the meantime, students, professors and staff need to remind themselves that we live in a time, when -- like it or not -- racial profiling exists and is not going away, and we are all suspect. Empty rebellions against authority are just that, and we need to put our energies to more productive, more sophisticated use.