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Report on the Pumpkin Riots in Keene, NH
Keene is a small city in a quiet corner of New Hampshire. It is quintessential New England: traditional architecture, small-town feel, beautiful foliage, and civic pride. Bordering Vermont and Massachusetts, it has a touch of the gray-haired Yankee hippy with localvore, local-this and local-that, mixing commerce and idealism. A college town — Keene State College abuts the downtown area — it has plenty of Volvos and Subarus.
For more than 20 years, Keene has hosted its annual Pumpkin Festival, a combination Halloween and Harvest Festival that regularly is the largest congregation of carved pumpkins in the world, briefly turning this quiet, bucolic town into a tourist destination for thousands of visitors. Lately, HGTV has gotten in on the act with reality shows from the event. Every state-wide and regional politician — both incumbents and challengers — was there, pressing the flesh. Scott Brown, in particular, was a huge hit this year.
In this age of terrorism, the security concerns for a soft target like this are taken seriously, but dealt with appropriately. You don’t see the drones in the air but they are there. The police are discrete yet present. It is a fun, happy place with lots of family-friendly activities, including a fun Halloween parade for the little ones (and not so little ones).
This year riots came.
“Rowdy Night Ushers in Keene Pumpkin Festival” (NH Union Leader)
“Mayhem erupts Saturday in neighborhoods near Keene State campus” (SentinelSource)
“Several injuries reported as police clash with students near campus of Keene State College in New Hampshire” (Mass Live)
“City of Keene quiet Sunday, one day after chaotic scene” (WMUR-TV)
As you can imagine, the students of Keene State use the Pumpkin Festival as an excuse for a big party, and they invite their friends from out of town and out of state. Lately, neighboring schools — and there are many — send busloads of students to Keene for the festival. This year, UNH, Dartmouth, and Boston area schools also sent buses. Not just college students, but lots of non-collegiate twenty-somethings as well. These ingredients have long been here, but this year the mixture was volatile. Last year there was an inkling, with a college party getting out of hand. But nothing like this year.
Supposedly the troubles started with a five-way fight near campus. Groups of kids around the fighters started throwing beer bottles at each other. Then street signs were pulled out of the ground. Then they started flipping cars. By then the police had them cordoned away from the rest of the festival.
My family and I were working at the food booth my son’s scout troop has at the festival. If it weren’t for everyone’s twitter/news feeds going off on their smartphones, we would never have known about the mayhem, even though the bad events were 4-5 blocks away. The festival continued very nicely and the bad behavior was contained, even as the rumor mill worked overtime. The aftermath of news reports and social media are how the bulk of festival-goers learned about the Pumpkin riots. Nevertheless, the riots were bad and lasted late into the night, including fires being set in the street.
The police were excellent, and handled the situation as well as can be expected. Officials kept cool heads and did not overreact, but displayed firmness and resolve. They were in regular police uniforms, not SWAT gear (although there was a SWAT team in back-up as appropriate for an event as big as this).
As the situation escalated, back-up forces came from the rest of the state, as well as Massachusetts and Vermont. They worked to contain the rioters and minimize the harm. At one point they dispelled the bulk of the rioters with a traditional riot gear phalanx march and pepper spray. Then they steadily tightened the noose and dispersed the crowd via various means, while arresting the hard-core and providing medical attention to the injured. No shots fired, no batons cracked heads. Plenty of arrests. Lots of pictures for trials from the overhead drone cameras and social media. The law and insurance companies will not have trouble finding the perpetrators who got away.
It would not have been fun if you were caught in it, or if your car was one of those flipped. But that was the fault of the rioters, not the police.
Search on Twitter at #Pumkinfest, #PumpkinFest, #Pumpkinfest Police, #PumpkinSpiceRiots for pictures and comments. Twitter is full of comments comparing this to Ferguson. This was not Ferguson. It is ridiculous the degree to which everything is racial now (thanks to the Left for “heightening” racial awareness).
Perhaps the best explanation why they did it is from a nondescript, excited punk who said he was from Haverhill Mass. — “it’s fun to do things you’re not supposed to.”
Published in General
Well there’s that too. Me? I’d cancel before the CCTV.
No gents, it i because of “GLOBAL WARRRRRRMING” (Best if you read this in Homer Simpson’s voice). ;)
Yeah, that’s proving somewhat difficult.
Then give the cat her own box so she is not an excuse…
Well put.
Yeah, the problem area is where off-campus apartments abut on-campus housing, probably 3-4 blocks long and 1-2 blocks wide. Put a cop every 10 feet and a squad car at every intersection and I suspect the problem goes away.
True, but there was a purpose then! ;-)
I know people don’t like cultural arguments, but the coarsening of the culture and defining deviancy down have to have an effect here. I was no saint when I was in college. I went to and hosted plenty of parties. But we wanted to have fun, and that didn’t include terrorizing others and destroying property. Of course we were “children” of Reagan and Thatcher…
Apparently, they are going at it full tilt. Large number of students at all the schools of the NH University System are cooperating to identify all the perps for the authorities. The word is that students will be expelled and charges will be filed. At this point they are talking about bringing down heavy hammers.
They used to have traffic cameras in town, but most of them were pulled out a few years ago. The last few years they have had eyes in the sky with reconnaissance drones on loan from the National Guard. I expect that will continue. Apparently, social media is proving quite useful. It’s amazing how many people happily incriminate themselves for somebody’s phone camera.
This was another example of the responsibility and restraint of concealed carry permit-holders. Given the large numbers of concealed carry permit holders in the state, I am sure there were hundreds of such at the festival. Not one weapon was brandished (other than the tear gar and riot gear march).
Other than some early morning sprinkles, it was a beautiful, picture-postcard-perfect day! Real New England Autumn weather. Love it.
An update on a positive note. Not all the college students are PumpkinSpiceRioters. Early Sunday morning, large numbers of Keene State students turned out and completely picked up the area where all the rioting had been. Apparently by afternoon they had cleaned it up.
Also, on social media students from various colleges are organizing to identify all the trouble-makers and turn them in for justice.
Also, a kickstarter-type campaign has been started to raise money to replace at least one of the flipped cars. This is for a student who uses it to commute to his job, while he puts himself through college. He is poor, so he had minimal insurance only covering damage to others, not his car.
It helps restore ones faith in this generation.
I know what you mean, but I don’t think it’s that we didn’t care. In some ways we cared too much. As ours were growing up (now age 25-28) it struck me how every activity was programmed and monitored by adults. God forbid they should play stickball in the street like we did. No, everybody had to play in sanctioned leagues from T-Ball on up. I think we kept our kids from learning how to get along and respect each other, and this is reflected in strange events like pumpkin festival mayhem.
Sorry this may seem to be wandering off topic, but it’s one of those things that resonates with me, and I think the impact is broader than we realize.
By the way, attendance this year was apparently over 80,000 people. Keene itself has a total population of about 30,000.
I just realized you were talking about your packing-cat, not packing-heat. My bad.
That’s a good point and not off the topic of why. It’s true college students have a long history of rioting (if I remember correctly the first riot in North America was during the 17th century when Harvard students rioted because their beer ration had been cut. Some things never change…
As a parent with teenagers, I feel that we have over-programmed ours. We do try to give them more non-planned time. But the culture pushes one toward programming.
“it’s fun to do things you’re not supposed to.” Left wing bumper sticker forthcoming.
If our kids always have the training wheels of parents keeping them upright while they ride through life, it can be no surprise to us when they go off to college, then crash and burn in Keene’s PumpkinSpiceRiot.
All that’s good in this story is there are many young people among them who know what is right and are willing to bear a true witness to what they saw in Keene.
+1 for humanity.
0 for PumpkinSpiceRiot
Multiple Choice Test, Select only one.
A. It’s fun to do things you’re not supposed to.
B. Don’t do stupid stuff.
which makes me think of Smashing Pumpkins (the band,) and this:
Re comment 45
s
< I don't think you're wandering off topic at all. But I do think that whether you program a child's every waking hour or leave him with Tom Sawer like free time, you can fail to show him that adults respect and care for their families and communities, and you can fail to show him you believe he can and should grow up. The good public behavior No Caesar describes (comment 44, I think) was once the norm, either because more people as old as 20 once "got it" that none of us can survive without communities, and communities can't survive without civility and some practice of "Do unto others....", or because people once more often needed to avoid the unpleasent consequences of being viewed as irresponsible, violent, malicious or disorderly. As for the 17th century Harvard students who rioted, I'll bet they were chronologically younger than college students are today.
“Rioting for Fun and Profit” (Edward Banfield) comes to mind
Good one (as “1979” plays in the background).
Good points. In the past there was an aspiration to behave respectably. Now, it’s cool to be ghetto. It affects all segments of society, but harms the less well off the most, as they are most vulnerable to the consequences of bad behavior.
I am not familiar with that. Can you expand on it?
Helicopter parents may be part of the problem. But I think the greater problem is the past few decades of the growing “plastic participation trophy” mentality, as Adam Carolla describes it. The self-esteem movement has created a generation that feels it is great, even when it hasn’t accomplished much. Also, it belittles real accomplishments. Thus a generation has been deprived of the true feeling of accomplishment from winning something that is hard. Even though on the surface they may be walking bundles of unwarranted arrogance, instinctively they know that they’ve not really accomplished anything. This toxic mixture feeds back into a combo of resentment and nihilism. Cap it off with the malaise of the Obama economy and it’s easy to see how we got here. It is no surprise that the most in-demand parts of the military are those that are most-challenging. The young instinctively want to be truly challenged, and if they aren’t they go Children Of The Corn.