Another troll gets his 15 minutes and then some.
If you have not yet seen the video on YouTube in which University of Florida student Andrew Meyer refuses to comply with police and suffers the consequences, drop what you’re doing and watch it. If you’re like me, you may be awed and left entranced by what you see.
By which I mean the single greatest performance of all time.
Andrew Meyer, as one attention seeker to another, I must bow down and admit inadequacy. Taking college classes? Ladies and gentlemen, this man should be teaching them, specifically classes aimed towards teaching you how to dance properly for the spotlight and how to bathe in the impending praise, already being administered by folks on Facebook and YouTube, some of whom believe Andrew to be a “hero.”
A martyr for the revolution against people who want a forum free of idiocy, his actions riled up two separate protests on the University of Florida campus. One group went straight to the source of evil, the police headquarters itself. The other group occupied Emerson Hall to display its disapproval of the UF police officers’ fascist brutality.
According to Benjamin Dictor, leader of the protests and a junior in political science at Florida, this is bigger than just one attention whore. It goes higher, much higher, as this is a battle against a “culture of suppression of free thought and free speech.”
Which is why you can protest in the first place, right? Which is why you have speakers come to campus and field questions, right? Questions. Relevant, logical questions, not absurd statements issued by a guy who barged his way to the microphone during someone else’s turn and requested that someone film the entire ordeal.
In the video, Andrew works the crowd, and most viewers, into siding with him. It makes sense. He plays on a distrust of authority to take the role of victim and garner sympathy he does not deserve.
A summary glance of his personal Web site reveals that he was “arrested for speaking at Kerry forum” and that the cops “attacked … manhandled and Tasered” him. Clearly, this description rides parallel to his behavior in the video.
He starts off by shouting “Are you going to arrest me?” even though there is no indication that the cops were going to do that. And then he begins thrashing around and causing a scene, forcing the police to introduce Mr. Meyer to Mr. Taser. During the ordeal, he issues a series of rhetorical questions designed to paint himself as an innocent, naïve college student under suppression for his radical ideas, but any sort of thinking reveals a far different character.
Andrew Meyer is not a victim of an Orwellian police state or a New World Order seeking to impose an iron blanket on freedom. He is a clown who pulled a stunt and is now capitalizing on the exposure it’s receiving.
Dictor, never failing to compare apples to oranges, said, “All of these things have been eroding the First Amendment in this country and creating a far more censored state.”
In the past decades, the Bill of Rights has been increasingly stunted, and yes, we do live in a more censored state, but the zapping of one loudmouth idiot cannot compare to FCC censorship, illegal wiretapping, the Patriot Act and a host of other problems facing this country.
What we have is a college student with too much time on his hands out to make a name for himself. As of this writing, the first YouTube video of the incident has received over one million views, so to this effect, he is succeeding.
And if you persist in claiming that Meyer’s Tasering is one more sign of our freedoms crumbling, then I suppose FEMA concentration camps are not too far behind. I suppose the government perpetrated Sept. 11 and everything you read in PrisonPlanet.com and see in Loose Change is automatically true, regardless of silly things like evidence and logic.
Andrew Meyer — martyr for misguided fools. I am glad they Tasered this moron, and in fact, I hope he disrupts another forum and receives further punishment.
I just hope next time they administer tear gas.
— Travis Lee is a senior in French. He can be reached at [email protected].
