Dumbshits behaving badly

OK, let’s be clear here: the authorities do stupid things. The authorities make bad decisions, use bad judgment and excessive force, and abuse their authority all the time. We do not need to help them do so.

Just in the last two weeks, we’ve had at least these incidents:

• Lennox Yearwood is tackled, injured, and arrested as he tries to push his way into the US Capitol for the General Petraeus presentation.
• Andrew Meyer is zapped with a Taser and arrested when he causes a disruption and refuses to leave the microphone at a John Kerry speech at University of Florida.
• And yesterday, MIT student Star Simpson is arrested at gunpoint when she shows up at Boston’s Logan Airport with an electronic device attached to her sweatshirt.

Come on, people: this stuff accomplishes nothing besides making you — and your supporters — look bad. There are plenty of stories out there about people being arrested, delayed, or otherwise hassled for no good reason, when they were doing nothing wrong. Wearing a t-shirt that says “Give Peace a Chance” in a shopping mall is not a cause for arrest. Speaking a “foreign language” on an airplane is not cause for detention and questioning for three hours after you land.

But you don’t get to lunge for the door of the houses of Congress, and not expect to be physically stopped and restrained. You don’t get to disrupt a public event and then wrestle with police, and not expect them to take what action they deem necessary to bring the situation under control. And you absolutely qualify as the subject dumbshit if you think you can show up at an airport with electronics strapped to your body, and just wander around waiting for your boyfriend’s plane.

Ms Simpson’s reasoning?:

“She said that it was a piece of art and she wanted to stand out on career day,” Pare said. “She claims that it was just art, and that she was proud of the art and she wanted to display it.”

Oh, give me a break. Well, she’s now had her 15 minutes of fame, and has gotten to display her art on the news. I hope she’s happy.

I’m not. I'm thoroughly tired of this trend to do stupid things and then post the video on YouTube.

We have to pick our fights. We have to be sensible about what we protest and how we do it. The statements we make have to make sense in order to make their points. Dumbshits behaving badly accomplish nothing, and benefit no one.