“First amendment rights have always stopped at yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre, and they stop at fomenting a race riot.”
This wasn’t Harlem, or East L.A. It was Cambridge, where the intellectual elite have deigned to live. Not likely to have a race riot amongst that crowd of eggheads.
The professor showed a typical egghead response—his offended intellect demanded respect and subservience from the vastly undereducated and inferior police officer, and so he was spewing hostility, albeit while balancing himself on a cane. I’m sure it was a bit comical, and not the least threatening to two much larger and well armed police officers. I’m sure also that this was not the first time that the police officer had been talked down to by the local intelligencia, and he quite understandably had had enough.
It’s not illegal to insult a police officer. But most of the time it will get you arrested, even if typically the charge is later dropped as it was here. It may not be a legal arrest, but that’s what’s going to happen in the real world, if not something even worse.
This wasn’t Harlem, or East L.A. It was Cambridge, where the intellectual elite have deigned to live. Not likely to have a race riot amongst that crowd of eggheads.
There are people in Cambridge who can be incited to throw a rock and hurt someone...or should the cop have been able to mind meld with the public and be sure he was in no danger?
CC: rolling_stone, Republic, piytar
This wasn’t Harlem, or East L.A. It was Cambridge, where the intellectual elite have deigned to live. Not likely to have a race riot amongst that crowd of eggheads.
I appreciate and understand your response. I would posit, however, that there is no such thing as local anymore, and that all things said and done in this case were for national consumption. Gates was unexpectedly presented with an opportunity, handed to him, as it were, on a silver platter. But opportunity, as it is said, is 90% preparation. Gates was, as ever, on the lookout and prepared, and when opportunity presented itself he shaped and packaged it for national consumption. The crowded theatre of which I speak was not merely Cambridge, but every dry tinderbox of poverty sizzling in the hot July sun.