Friday, April 25, 2014

Blarney Blowout Repercussions


 Blarney Blowout:  2 of 53 arrestees

The justice system is methodically sorting out the 53 arrestees at the infamous Blarney Blowout, with a major offender striking a deal  last week and another one making an appearance on Wednesday for a pre trial hearing that I'm told will be disposed of on June 9 with a plea deal.

Since the six charges include both Misdemeanors and Felonies it will be interesting to see what the Judge decides.  Hopefully the $160,000 study/report from former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis will be available by then as well.

At the very least I hope the consultants have requested copies of all 53 "Statement of Facts" from the APD arrests on that deleterious day.

Stephen Gage, 20, acted as a ringleader, firing up a huge throng of students to assault highly outnumbered Amherst and UMass police officers with "rocks, ice chunks, beer bottles and beer cans."

Also notice that indeed pepper spray was used on Mr. Gage, but only to subdue him as he struggled with officers while resisting arrest.

Yes, the problem with Blarney Blowout (or Hobart Hoedown) is you get a huge crowd of 1,000s of hyped up students -- most of them under the influence of alcohol -- and then it only takes a few "agitators" like Stephen Gage to create a major riot.

Of course when Mr. Gage appears before the Judge on June 9 he will be standing with only his (expensive) attorney.


10 comments:

Anonymous said...

A lenient judge will derail the entire effort to put an end to this dangerous "student holiday". I sincerely hope they all receive the maximum sentence. Anything less is a slap in the face to the police. Richard Marsh.

Anonymous said...

I don't like everything the police do; and they can be overzealous at times. However, there is a place for policing and the "Blarney Blowout" clearly shows why some policing is necessary to uphold public safety.

Dr. Ed said...

I respectfully suggest that people speculate on the possibility of what could potentially have happened had the agitators (a) been malicious and (b) had a tactical plan -- or any strategy beyond just "throw things at the cops."

You have an alienated population that effective (competent) leadership with both tactical objectives and a desire to inflict actual harm upon the town -- as opposed to just being drunk & obnoxious.

I'm thinking specifically of some of the tactics the Patriots employed in Boston during the American Revolution and assuming the accuracy of the APD's allegations, it's really quite frightening to think about what he could have gotten the mob to do -- and which another mob could well do.

My point is that it is inherently dangerous to have a population (UM Students) as alienated as they are. I suggest this is something folk really need to worry about...

Anonymous said...

Yes Ed, we're all peeing our pants from fright, just like you. I heard a rumor that the ROTC students are planning an all-out amphibious assault on the town, starting at the duck pond.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Anonymous said...

Actually, I'm with Ed here: why are these kids, some of the most privileged people on Earth, acting out their Chicago 1968 fantasies in Amherst for St. Patrick's Day? How have they gotten the idea that this kind of behavior is ever acceptable?

Answer: their parents are a bunch of idiots, and their teachers are a bunch of idiots. The whole country is run by Baby Boomer idiots. The sooner everyone born between 1940 and 1970 drops dead, the sooner our society can begin recovering from the damage they've inflicted on it.

Dr. Ed said...

The sooner everyone born between 1940 and 1970 drops dead, the sooner our society can begin recovering from the damage they've inflicted on it.

You can't blame this on the baby boomers -- at least not in terms of them being the parents of the current cadre of UM students. Now as to members of that generation being responsible for the alienation said students feel....

First, remember that Pearl Harbor was December 7, 1941 -- with the war ending in 1945. True Baby-Boomers were born between 1946 and 1958, with the youngest child often born a few years after that -- the children started being conceived when the guys came home.

We have had alternating big & small generations all the way back to the Civil War, and while there were lots of babies born before the Depression (the people who went on to fight WW-II and then become the parents of the Boomers), there were very few born in the 1930s, in the depths of the First Depression. (Unlike now, the expenses of a child were borne by the child's parents.)

This is the generation that became the parents of so-called "Generation X" and their children are the ones in college today.

Remember that the baby boomers all had their children in the mid-late '80s -- the so-called "baby boomlet" and where their parents had 3-5 children (or more), they had 1-2 children, the so-called "Millenials" or "Generation Y."

That generation is now all in their 20's and largely out of college -- this is the cause of the demographic "body shortage" that no one in higher education wants to talk about, but which is very real.

Dr. Ed said...

The parents of today's UM students -- if they attended UM, would have done so in the 1990s. This was when the crackdowns on alcohol and everything else started -- and progressed. This was when I sensed that the riots of today were coming, that there was a visceral level of suppressed rage toward -- basically -- the people running the UMass Dorms and the Town of Amherst.

Now if these are the parents of the current cadre of UM students -- and to some extent they are -- then you have a cadre of students who have been brought up believing that Amherst is populated by A-holes whom they should treat with more contempt than they do the NY Yankees.

Like I said, boys 'n' girls, you have a problem here. It's not that "the parents are a bunch of idiots" as much as that a good chunk of them are still mad at you for things that happened during the Clinton Administration - and your relationship with their children is starting from there and then going further downhill...

Anonymous said...


"The parents of today's UM students -- if they attended UM, would have done so in the 1990s"

Actually, A lot of us with college age kids went to college in the 1980s. (I graduated in 1983.)

Dr. Ed said...

Actually, A lot of us with college age kids went to college in the 1980s. (I graduated in 1983.)

And the Student Affairs Profession, which presumes (somehow) that it can fit human beings into nice little precisely arranged boxes, has again been shown for the fraud I consider it to be.

The rationale is that children are born less than 10 years after college graduation, usually less than 5-7 years -- and that the mother is less than 30 years older than her child.

Hence the child of a '83 graduate would have been born before 1993 and be over 21 years old today -- and we're largely talking about the 18-21 year old cadre in terms of problematic behavior -- mostly 18 year old freshmen.

Which your child statistically isn't going to be -- and hence can't be. As everyone is in a nice little box, reality notwithstanding.

Therefore, according to the Student Affairs profession, neither you nor your child exist -- and if that alone makes you feel alienated, well, I won't even get into the stuff that would truly upset you.

Anonymous said...

Well my first was born in 1987. He attended Skinner Preschool at UMass- While there I was asked to participate in a survey for "older mothers" (I was 25 when he was born) I was quite amused!