Got Gas?

Good Morning!
Well I am really dragging this morning and I need to get into a writing mood (I have another case evaluation due this morning) so I thought I would write a little bit here and hope that it gets my mojo going…
There has been something that I wanted to talk about since Sunday but for some reason it slipped my mind… It is regarding the supposed “Riots” that happened in East Lansing, MI after the Spartans lost their Final Four game. The morning after the game my roommate received a call from his bro, a junior at State, who filled us in on some details. It was basically decided by the police the week previous that they were going to have a zero tolerance policy when it came to gatherings of any number of people after the game.
Now East Lansing does have a history of rioting after sporting events, but there is something inherently wrong with a “teargas first” method of crowd control. From all of the news footage and accounts I have heard the most raucous events that were occurring outside were sudden outbreaks of a “GO GREEN, GO WHITE” chant. There were no bottles being thrown, no cars tipped and certainly no fires, but in the midst of a spontaneous pep rally there WAS teargas. And the police were not just gassing the large crowd that had gathered in Cedar Village either, they were gassing everybody. My roommate’s bro was gassed walking to McDonalds. What the hell! Nothing like a good preemptive gassing to prevent anything bad from happening… oh wait it did. You see there weren’t any violent outbreaks UNTIL the gas started. It was at that time that the students turned on the police and started throwing rocks, bottles and even the teargas containers back at the police. Don’t they realize that violence begets violence? I just don’t understand. Why was a state of almost Martial Law necessary? Just like how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop… the world may never know…

For more on this check out Jim Caple’s article on ESPN.com

Well I’m off to work… *sigh*