Some unrelated information and commentary to end the week…(and, yes, to those of you who asked, the News Guy is almost fully recovered from the mid-week attack of the ague)

A reasonable person  might almost sympathize with Burlington Police Cpl. Paul Glynn for arresting 21-year-old Darin Cassler Monday for the crime of organizing and engaging in the well-known felony of pillow-fighting.

Put yourself in the position of a police officer walking down the Church Street mall and all of a sudden coming upon a veritable regiment (48-strong, according to published reports) of young folks who might have been clogging the street, but who were at any rate obviously organized, not to mention armed.

OK, armed with pillows, not usually considered a lethal weapon. But you never know. Faced with what must have been an unprecedented (for everyone, not just him) spectacle, Cpl. Glynn appears to have fallen back on a cop’s instinctive reaction: Arrest Somebody.

The reason for the sympathy is that the rest of the Burlington and Chittenden County law enforcement establishment clearly recognized that he had over-reacted. In this case, being (at least so it seems) ridiculed by his peers would be sufficient punishment, especially because the charges against Cassler were dropped. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they were never really picked up.

Of course, the police department, being a police department, in announcing that the young man would not be prosecuted, had to put out a stern statement, warning that “these types of events can have collateral/negative impact on the area in which they are held.”

Were there any reason to take such statements seriously to begin with it might be tempting to try to find some meaning in this one. Happily, there is not.

Do you suppose it’s possible that Entergy Vermont Yankee actually hires the folks who protest against it?

Probably not. But how else explain how the nuclear power plant’s most recent antagonists have been its best friends?

First, at a meeting in Brattleboro, a Massachusetts woman named Sally Shaw (all this courtesy of the Brattleboro Reformer story by Bob Audette), who belongs to an anti-nuclear group called the New England Coalition, threw some compost at Michael Colomb, a Vermont Yankee Vice President.

Presumably there was some symbolic point to the use of what Shaw called “really good quality compost.” If so, the point is too subtle for some of us to grasp, making the  childishness of the gesture even more obvious.

Then there was the complaint by the New England Coalition  asking Attorney General William Sorrell to investigate the relationship between Vermont Yankee lobbyist Jay Thayer and Commissioner David O’Brien of the Department of Public Service.

On its face, this is not entirely a frivolous suggestion. O’Brien’s department regulates Thayer’s company. Keeping an arms length relationship between the two of them would probably be a good idea. So O’Brien might have been well advised not to invite Thayer to a Christmas party in Stowe last December. He invited him anyway.

But Shay Totten provided the world with that information in his Seven Days column on January 21. Asked for further evidence of questionable O’Brien-Thayer contact, Clay Turnbull of the  Coalition could only say that O’Brien seems to give Vermont Yankee everything it desires.

True enough. Still, one invitation to a fairly large gathering (it wasn’t a two-man tete-a-tete) seems scant evidence of impropriety, as Sorrell immediately noted. (Friday morning update: Sorrell has officially rejected the request to conduct an investigation) Pressure groups, like investigative reporters, should pay attention to the My Darling Clementine Rule, based on one of the great lines from that great 1946 movie: “When you draw a gun, kill a man.”

Today’s theme seems to combine possibly imprudent political protest with arguably unnecessary law enforcement. Let’s wrap them together at the University of Vermont, where 100 students protested academic budget cuts with a sit-in Wednesday afternoon, and 26 Friday morning update: or 31, or perhaps 33) were arrested when they refused to leave that night. (Apparently only one was taken into custody; the others were given citations).

There are roughly 10,000 undergraduates at UVM. If this pocket calculator is correct, that means about one (1) percent of the students support the faculty union, United Academics (of which News Guy, a very part-time adjunct at UVM, is a member), in opposing faculty layoffs. Instead, the union argues, the university should save money by getting rid of some of its highly paid top managers, or at least cutting their pay.

Faced with a one percent turnout, the student and/or union leaders might have wondered whether going ahead with the protest demonstration would demonstrate more weakness than protest.

But let’s admire their tenacity, if not their wisdom. Off they went, and some of them refused to leave the president’s wing of Waterman Hall, the University administration building, when ordered to do so by the police (whose boss is Gary Margolis; no relation if anyone wondered). Meaning they were probably guilty of trespass, meaning arresting them was legally justified.

But maybe not smart. According to all the reports, the students weren’t hurting anything. This was not like Columbia University in 1968 when students trashed offices, destroyed property, and defaced books. This demonstration was arguably pointless and juvenile. It wasn’t dangerous. Arresting the demonstrators made the demonstration seem stronger than it was.  Leaving the kids in there, possibly to get bored and tired and drift out one by one, would have accentuated the ineptitude of the demonstration. Arresting them could arouse sympathy for them. The headline becomes “student arrested” instead of “demonstration fizzles.”

But you know what they say. Sometimes all that edjy-kay-shun gets in the way of common sense.

Oh, and speaking of education, the Greek whose last words asked a friend to make a sacrifice on his bahalf to Asklepios, the god of healing, was not Spiro Agnew. It was Socrates (up top; a photo of a statue in the Louvre), who just after drinking the hemlock, but before it had taken full effect, said (according to Plato), “Crito, I owe a cock to Asklepius. Will you see that the debt is paid”?

Tags: UVM, Vermont Yankee

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 12:15 am and is filed under Energy & Environment, Schools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.