Remember going out on Friday night with a group of people you’d just met, yet feel you’d known all your life, and partying the night away, then topping it all off by watching the most beautiful sunrise you had ever seen? Remember playing in the unrelenting snow all night on Russell St. without a care in the world? Remember when you weren’t in top form and a police officer would drive by and offer you a ride home? Yea… I can barely remember myself; it’s been all too long. If you are currently a freshman (first year if you wanna be PC about it) then you probably don’t remember any of these things and for that I can do nothing but apologize and hope this editorial can make some sort of impact. You are missing out on half of what college is about. Classes are incredibly important, don’t mistake me about that. You gain limitless knowledge by attending, participating in and understanding what is being taught. But there is much more to life than what’s taught in the classroom. Social skills are a key aspect to succeeding in the world. You could be as intelligent as Albert Einstein but if you can’t communicate your genius to others then it will be nearly impossible to apply your mind and that is a tragedy. A wonderful forum to sharpen these social skills is at parties. Yes parties do offer more than just getting drunk, staggering about and waking up with numerous random drunken injuries that you can not recall no matter how hard you try. Parties offer you a chance to meet and converse with new people and to interact with people you might not have had the opportunity to in other circumstances. Diversity, while fairly sparse in Plymouth (one of my least favorite aspects of going to school here, falling right behind the arctic tundra of Plymouth’s winter abyss), is crucial to becoming a more well rounded person and very important in the aspect that you will have to work with people who are very different from you after school, and now is the perfect time to meet different kinds of people instead of setting yourself up for a culture shock after college. The police really used to be our friends; they even understood the significance of the weekend and its necessity to allow us to escape the stress of exams, upcoming due dates and all the rest of the madness. It seems that in the past two years the school has decided to review the campus police’s role and make them into a negative factor through the viewpoint of the average student. I don’t want to be uncomfortable when the police pass me on the street anymore. I don’t want to find myself having a great party at 11:30 on a Friday night just to have the police come to my door and tell me I can only have 6 people in my house when I have 4 roommates. I’m sick of this ridiculousness we’re all bending over and taking… at least they should supply some lubricant, we certainly pay them enough in tickets for them to. Despite all of the angst I’ve already unloaded on this keyboard, I have yet to touch upon the final straw; the reason I finally had to write this… internal possession. This new travesty (which I’ve already been arrested for, after drinking two alcoholic beverages) has crossed entirely too far over the line. Plymouth is a college town, every college town has underage drinking, and therefore Plymouth has underage drinking. This used to be a given and th
In a recent informative meeting with the campus police, Chief Clark assured me and the rest of Plymouth’s January Orientation staff that the internal possession law would only come into effect when it was obvious that a minor was intoxicated. This is a great way for a college town such as Plymouth to approach New Hampshire’s new regulation responsibly. Unfortunately while Chief Clark personally lives up to this decree, not all of the campus police do. I hear countless stories from my friends every weekend, many of whom are well over 21, about being stopped by bored campus police officers and having their ID’s checked without any reason besides the fact that they can. Maybe they just need a copy of Vice City to play at the station, not only will that keep them entertained but it will also allow students to walk the streets with a hell of a lot less discomfort and fear. It’s a sad fact that students have more fear of their protectors than the actual problem of crime… and that’s why I call out to all of Plymouth’s students. We need a change.