Imagine, for a moment, that I had walked the streets of Tufts and the surrounding area on any given weekend night, filming what I saw with my hand-held video camera.
Now pretend that my housemates spent the next morning curiously watching the tape while I snored through the day.
They might think that I was attempting to produce an ultra-low-budget version of George Orwell's 1984. How could I fault these hypothetical friends for holding this hypothetical falsehood?
All they would see would be the campus streets deserted and eerily quiet, their stillness broken only by the frequent zooming by of black police cruisers manned by the lock-jawed, serious looking policemen; they would see a ghost town populated by law enforcement demons that go bump in the night.
The point I am trying to illustrate is that this campus has somehow become a dystopian mockery of its former self. This is a truth that cannot be denied, a truth that begs the questions of, "When?"and "Why?" and "How?".
These are complex questions that we, as a community, have been wrestling with this semester. Surely Tufts did not go from being an exciting community held together by bonds of mutual respect-- a community that I willfully encouraged my younger sister to join when she began her college search-- to what it is today in a single moment.
This transformation began as part of a process, a process that was no doubt carried forth with the best of intentions.
The administration sought to follow the law, the RAs sought to follow the rules, the students were a bit over-exuberant in their revelry, and the police wanted to restore an atmosphere of peace and quiet they felt was being violated.
While all of these groups deserve some degree of blame, the omnipresence of the police forms the ugly face of this
problem.
My search for an understanding of what has happened led me to the archives of this paper, where I found much has already been written on the subject.
In a Sept. 5 article entitled,"Police effort cracks down on partying," Captain Upton of the Somerville Police Department offered up as a rationale for police behavior the fact that "there are people with real jobs" in the town he serves.
The captain seemed to be contrasting the "real jobs" of those people with the unreal jobs of the complaining students.
The last time I checked, my position as a student at Tufts entailed very "real" commitments and very "real" work. Yet the police appear to be denying this, at least by implication.
Regardless of our status as "real" workers, why do the police persist in trampling our rights? To find the answer to this question, we have to "get in the heads" of these officers and understand their thought processes,- as scary a thought as that might be. Could it be that a metaphysical crisis being felt by the officers of the area is the root of the malaise that hangs over our school?
Perhaps one summer day, as they were busy investigating some unusually potent confiscated narcotics in the evidence locker, they suffered a collapse of faith in the existence of the world around them (as happened just a few hundred years ago to Renee Descartes).
And so they must have scampered about the jailhouse in a fit of existential confusion, releasing potentially dangerous dope-fiends to score "pot" in the community and spilling donuts and coffee all over the floor.
Finally, we can imagine, these penseurs of the prisons, these intelligencia of the incarceration stumbled upon a solution: vere opus ergo sum, their jailhouse meditations must have told them, "I do real work, therefore I am."
And continuing with glee at their newly found powers of illogic: "therefore, by the law of the false contrapositive: Tufts students do not exist, since they do no real work!" It is in this dubious conclusion that our problems of this semester seem to lie.
At last we come to the only possible explanation for the officers' baffling behavior: obviously, they have undergone a Cartesian crisis that led to their doubting the very existence of the Tufts students and therefore of the rights of those students as humans and citizens.
But, the skeptical reader might respond, all of this seems far-fetched and based upon naught but conjecture.
I would reply to such an astute reader with the challenge that he propose a likelier reason for such grossly inappropriate behavior on the part of these wayward civil servants.I submit that the fulfillment of such a challenge is impossible.Their behavior has led me to my own metaphysical doubts.
In their wanton actions this semester, the police have not only crossed legal lines, but have brusquely passed through the frontier of courtesy and respect that binds us together as human beings.
Consider this behavior: two police officers lay in ambush, their cruiser shrouded in darkness on a dark Friday night. Suddenly, they have it, the scent of a freshmen herd, en route to the grasslands of inebriation.
Following, they discover a waterhole on a rented tap, where the herds gather to drink and mate. Seizing their chance, they hungrily pounce upon the masses of rapidly dispersing students, barking and yapping at all who pass.
Finding myself in this situation, I--a moderately drinking, 21-year-old adult--am forced to ask myself: is this hulking, red-faced creature who is growling at me to "GET RID OF" my "GODDAM BEER" really a human, or is he some kind of beast?
When a member of the Medford, Somerville, or Tufts University police departments dons his uniform to patrol the night, does he remove his humanity?
Frank Curren is a senior majoring in history.
