(This post was called “Dances with Pigs” originally, but I decided to change it, because I didn’t want to be thought of as a cop-hater, as I’m not one. But since hippies call cops “pigs”, I thought it was appropriate, seeing as how they were being arrested for dancing.)
That’s right: a bunch of hippies were arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial on Memorial Day. Now, I make fun of hippies a lot, and I generally respect the police, but when you look at the video of this incident, it’s just silly. These are snarky white kids, and they’re being pretty badly manhandled by the cops just for some extremely minimalist “dancing”. This is the kind of dancing that I think black comedians are referring to when they say “white people can’t dance”, and as such, had the police been black (or any other ethnicity besides white), they might not have arrested them at all, since it really wasn’t good enough to be considered dancing as such. Had I been the cop, I would have laughed it off.
But here’s where it gets sticky legally. I didn’t bring up that whole “white people can’t dance” thing just to make a hurtful and offensive stereotype of the dancing-challenged white race. No, I had to bring this up, because many white people are so bad at dancing, it’s hard to tell that’s what they’re really doing. So then someone with a movement disorder, or someone moving their foot around because it fell asleep, or someone just trying to wake themselves up from a long drive (since they don’t want to be rude and fall asleep on their feet at the national monument) could be mistaken for someone who is dancing, if they’re white, that is. And so the police might start brutalizing and arresting white people all over the place who aren’t even really dancing, just because their fellow white people kind of dance like that.
And it only gets worse from there! Due to discrimination laws, the police will start to have to act like people of all ethnicities dance crappy like white people, and so they’ll have to arrest all of them too. And what about other stuff that could be mistaken for dancing? What if some guy points up at the president at the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorial, but it’s mistaken by the police as that dancing pose John Travolta famously did in Saturday Night Fever? Will they jump on him and beat him up with billy clubs?
I’m just afraid this is going to be a slippery slope here, with people being arrested for dancing when they weren’t even dancing. So then we’re going to need some very specific laws to clarify what exactly constitutes dancing. And these laws would obviously be unfair to white people, since they can’t dance. And so then we’d get new lawsuits for white people under the disabilities laws, etc. It’s an endless cycle!
Maybe they just ought to let people dance a little bit if they want to. Think of the court costs it would save our nation! And really, how could the Supreme Court decide that dancing isn’t free speech? What ever happened to “the language of dance”?
Here’s a link to the story with some video:
