I hope everyone knows what I’m talking about when I say, “That Florida kid who got tasered.” (Or is it tased?)

I hope everyone gets the same warm, fuzzy feelings I get when I think of the sentence, “Don’t tase me bro! Don’t tase me!”

I hope everyone has seen the clip on YouTube and had a good, long laugh at the poor guy who had a run-in with the University of Florida police at a John Kerry speech.

And I hope everyone is just as confused about the whole thing as I am.

Maybe confused isn’t the right word, perhaps vexed fits better. This isn’t a typical case of excessive use of force by police officers. Typically, an undesirable individual with a criminal record gets shot, beaten up or tasered by police officers who claim to have acted in self-defense. Usually there isn’t video of the incident on the Internet. Rodney King’s video was widely seen – and his beating was much worse – and there were riots.

In case anyone doesn’t know, University of Florida student Andrew Meyer asked John Kerry about impeaching President George W. Bush and about Kerry and Bush’s involvement with the Yale secret society Skull and Bones – who apparently run the entire world, according to the Matt Damon movie “The Good Shepherd.” As far as I can tell, Meyer appeared to cooperate with the police and Kerry offered to answer the student’s question. In fact, Kerry can be heard on the video over the action asking everyone to calm down and calls Meyer’s question “very important” – even though I think any discussion about Skull and Bones or impeaching Bush is pretty pointless.

By the way, this video definitively proves to me that John Kerry would have been a bad president, even though I voted for him. Through the entire incident, Kerry meekly mutters his attempts at resolving the issue in that signature monotone of his. Could you imagine Kerry trying to rally Americans to his side after a natural disaster or calling out a foreign leader? Could he have come close to Ronald Reagan with his delivery of the line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” or matched the cadence of John F. Kennedy with, “Ask what you can do for your country?” I still think he would have done a better job than our current president, but not by much.

A friend of mine claims the reason there hasn’t been a national firestorm is because Meyer’s white, meaning brutality only matters when it happens to a minority. I disagree. I think there isn’t a national uproar about the whole thing because the actions of the police showed more restraint than in the Rodney King case and no one ended up killed or seriously injured. Sure, I think Meyer himself has a lot to do with why nobody is upset. We see a privileged college student trying to be controversial who has to deal with the consequences of his actions. But I think the actions of police weren’t justified, and it’s not like they can use the heat of the moment as an excuse. Meyer didn’t pose a physical threat to anyone and if they really wished to escort him out of the building they could have. Sure he would have continued to resist, but that happens when you arrest someone for asking a question you don’t like.

I asked an acquaintance of mine who recently graduated from law school how she feels about making a police officer’s job harder by applying so much scrutiny. She said she doesn’t feel bad about it because you learn everyone gets screwed by the police at some point. Don’t get me wrong, police officers perform necessary duties and many of them are genuine heroes – for instance, those who ran toward ground zero on Sept. 11. I know enough people, however, who have been in situations in which the police acted less than professional so that I believe what this young attorney told me, that everyone will get screwed by the police at some point. I just hope not everyone gets it the same way Meyer did.

Jason Palmer is a senior in journalism and Spanish. He can be reached at [email protected].