By now you’ve probably seen the video of the University of Florida student who was tasered after asking John Kerry some questions at an event. In one respect I’m sort of torn on this; Andrew Meyer, the student, was obviously grandstanding. “He’s an idiot,” comes one stray comment from the crowd as the cops are holding him down; and he was being obnoxious.

But.

There was no reason, no reason at all, for the campus cops to taser him - unless they specifically wanted to punish him for being uppity. And it’s obvious that’s just what they were doing; he’s got five cops on top of him, they have him cuffed, he isn’t going anywhere - and they taser him anyway.

The Rude Pundit, in a surprisingly non-rude post, nails it:

Yes, he did jump to the front of the line to demand to ask Kerry a question, but Meyer was tasered because he wouldn’t knuckle under to the authority of the cops. He wasn’t a threat, he wasn’t violent, he was trying to comply (although you try doing anything rational when you’re on the ground with half a dozen cops on top of you, yelling at you and an auditorium of people yelling about, some laughing at, what’s being done to you), and he still got tasered.

Our country is so devoid of actual dissent and activism, so filled with citizens cowed by cops and security of all sorts treating us like criminals, that stepping out of line in the smallest way or slightly breaking decorum now seems to deserve a smackdown. Acquiescence is not only expected. It will be enforced. And so many of us are willing to participate in the enforcement, rolling our eyes and laughing at those who would dare misbehave.