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By now, most people have heard what happened at the University of Florida in Gainesville on Monday when student Andrew Meyer was subdued with a Taser and arrested after his participation in a forum in which former presidential candidate John Kerry spoke.

If you haven't seen the footage or read about it in the newspaper, here is a quick recap (there may be extenuating details, but for the purposes of this article, this is what you need to know):

UF student Andrew Meyer walked up to an open microphone at the end of a question-and-answer segment with Kerry and began to ask a question. He described information from a book pertaining to the results of the last presidential election that said Kerry had actually won. He then asked about Kerry's involvement with a “secret society” that he and President George W. Bush were allegedly affiliated with at Yale. Before he could finish campus police badgered him, eventually cutting off his microphone.



The police then grabbed Meyer and began walking him down the aisle of the auditorium, while he struggled to free himself yelling, “Is anybody seeing this? I’m not doing anything!” The young man seemed genuinely surprised.

Even John Kerry was startled by the police’s reaction. “Let me answer his question,” he said into a microphone as Meyer was dragged away.

Meyer continued to resist, and the police’s treatment grew more violent. At one point in an amateur video of the event, he can be heard screaming, “Help! Help! What’d I do? Help me!”

Shortly thereafter he says one more thing before erupting into painful screams. His request? “Don’t tase me, bro.”

The police responded by shocking him with a taser and arresting him for disturbing the peace and resisting arrest.

The backlash from the incident has been immediate and polarized. Some people say Meyer was out of line; others maintain that the police were in their physical reaction to a non-violent incident.

Perhaps both sides are right. It has been reported that Meyer was a prankster and had planned to provoke some controversy. The university has suspended two of the officers involved in the arrest.



I attend Florida Gulf Coast University, and in its ten years of existence, the school has managed to bring political personalities like Colin Powell and Mikhail Gorbachev to speak to the community and students. The opportunity to engage in discussion with prominent political figures is a privilege that many college students enjoy. However, the fact that it is a privilege doesn’t mean that students should ask easy questions or ignore sensitive issues.

Although we are living in a period when political issues are as heated as ever – foreign policy in the Middle East, global warming, immigration - political activism and debate is in short supply. We tap into media outlets of every kind that feed us information and shape our knowledge and opinions, we complain about politics and moan about political leaders, but no one seems to be taking action. In fact no one even seems to be asking questions.

When political figures (John Kerry, for instance) make themselves available for the public to speak to, it is our privilege, responsibility and right as citizens to question their statements, promises and policies. And that’s exactly what Andrew Meyer did.

Today’s younger generation of bloggers and YouTubers are in the habit of whining online in blogs, on message boards and in Facebook groups, but we rarely demand honesty from government and we rarely ask them any questions.

Rather than being a pro-active culture we have become increasingly aloof, and that's dangerous.



The biggest injustice that was perpetrated in Gainesville this week was not police brutality; Andrew Meyer will heal quickly. It was not authority hushing what many are considering a demonstration of free speech. But rather it was that millions of people from my generation will see this story on TV or the Internet and get the none-too-subtle message that people who speak out will be silenced, labeled as a disturbance and at the very worst physically punished.

The day after the Meyer incident, only around 100 students (out of a UF population of over 46,000) banded together with signs saying "Decriminalize Free Speech," and "You can't tase my voice." The spirit may have been there, but sadly, the numbers were not.

Something must be done. Whether or not Meyer meant it to – his actions should be the springboard for thoughts and actions in each one of us. Let’s use our freedom of speech before our culture's indifference becomes reflex and dissent a lost ideal.

- Nick Krueger