New Hampshire Pumpkin Festival crowd sets fires, throws bottles : Vivie Behrens (Period 6, Week 3)

    This year at the 24th annual Pumpkin festival held in Keene, New Hampshire, (a town 80 miles northwest of Boston), full chaos ensued. Rowdy crowds terrorized the town by having bonfires in the streets and littering the city with broken whisky bottles and waste. Police, armed with tear gas and pepper spray, made their way through the rambunctious crowds in hope to bring peace and settle the disarray. Most of this mayhem was incited by local students with additional help from nearby residents. These terrorizers shouted expletives at the police, started fires around the town, tried to dismantle public property, and even tried to flip over a Subaru. Last year, there were 140 arrests and multiple injuries reported at this same event.
     This incident is remarkably similar to many of the rebellions held during the American revolution. The Boston Massacre, for example, was another display of the public revolting against the law enforcers of their town (and it was also ironically close in proximity to where this event occurred). This "Pumpkin festival massacre" is a horrifying example of the public disrespecting the law and terrorizing their neighbors with no apparent, justified cause. If such rebellions must ensue, I believe they must be a statement of beliefs that would eventually benefit society
as a whole, rather than plainly to disturb the peace of an ordinary town at an innocent pumpkin festival.

Source:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/19/us/new-hampshire-pumpkin-festival-riot/index.html?hpt=us_c2
Author:
Ed Payne