OPINION & EDITORIAL
A harrowing eve`
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Also by Badger Herald Editorial Board:
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- Dear Dave: Post this near your desk (April 17, 2003)
- Politicking destroyed opt-out's proponents (April 14, 2003)
- Don't Cut Historical Society Funds (April 29, 2003)
- Redirecting control (April 23, 2003)
Related Stories:
- Plans promise more treats than tricks (October 27, 2004)
- Let Halloween fall where it may (October 9, 2003)
- A hallow compromise (September 21, 2006)
- Balance needed this Halloween (October 21, 2003)
- Later bartime would prevent riot (October 13, 2005)
by Badger Herald Editorial Board
Monday, November 4, 2002
Halloween in Madison is really a celebration of State Street.
The stretch from Bascom to the Capitol, where a student clever at dodging buses can roam freely any day of the year and revelers can swarm at night without blocking traffic, is a perfect host for the Big Ten’s biggest costume party.
But the spot is more than a convenient conveyance. State Street, as we have written before, is the downtown’s center of vitality and character. Today, however, it looks in part like blocks of condemned warehouses, with plywood boards lining the promenade in place of glittering windows.
The street begs our attention and our patronage. Halloween is its annual honor. But Saturday’s violence misrepresents students’ relationship with the beloved corridor.
The University of Wisconsin’s alcohol culture is an irrepressible part of this campus’s character, and our condemning drunkenness would be, for its hypocrisy, tantamount to an essay ridiculing student journalism. But the destruction and damage to real businesses owned by real State Street entrepreneurs — the same shopkeepers and vendors whose faces we see smiling at us each day from behind the window or counter — warrants censure.
These are the same lives that supply the street with its livelihood, and their generosity is what we celebrate as their property hosts weekend revelry. In kind, we smashed their windows and left them to find the boards. This year’s celebration began with confusion about the date and ended in the confusion of chaos.
Who is to blame for it all? Several thousand were involved, including police riot squadrons. It is probably too complex a project to recognize the influences and pressures that caused a happy crowd to turn on the walls and windows housing it.
Police described the scene as “a gradual escalation of isolated incidents of violence and destructive behavior.” But students need to understand how the collected episodes fit together.
Halloween, after all, is just another demonstration of college camaraderie. We suited up together and we liquored up together and we invited friends from other campuses to our beautiful street. By the end, we had pulled a mask over the whole scene. That, of course, is what it’s all about, somewhere buried in the muck and mire of violence. We covered the street in illicitness — only some forgot to take off the mask in time to prevent fights or let ambulances through.
Curing the civic injury from this Halloween cannot be a police effort or a PACE project. Students cannot stop celebrating a holiday that is such an indispensable experience for undergraduates, alcohol included. We just need to remember what we are observing: Madison’s pleasant downtown artery and the people with whom we share it.
