Defending the "Gawkers."

Holla at your local Press-Citizen!

Read this article.

Now roll with me here:

Give some mad props to all the people at the Press Citizen for some objective journalism!

Apparently, I didn't get the memo that University students are inherently drunk idiots who all own cell phones and digital cameras and video cameras and only care about our plasma screen TVs. That's funny, I don't even own a camera.

We University students "[party] as we walked" around the downtown, because, you know, party is such a GREAT verb that people use all the time nowadays. And hey, it's not like our friends were the ones hit, or that student neighborhoods took the worst of the tornado damage. It wasn't like we were trying to inspect the damage of the town we cared about, or that we were walking to our friends' places to make sure they were still alive. Or that we were jamming up cell phone lines in order to try to reach these friends, or our parents who watched this all on the news.

Nope, not true, all we did was get drunk and get in the way of the police. All we cared about was getting drunk and partying on the rubble of our friend's houses. Like those kids that set up couches so as to block off a street littered with downed power lines? Yep, they were apathetic, drunk idiots with no concern for anything except their beer bottles. Or Luke Walker, an EMT student at the UIHC, who went around Washington Street right afterwards, seeking those who needed medical attention, even though his house was right in the damage path of the tornado? Yeah, I can't even tell you how little he cares. Or Mike Charles, a UISG senator whose apartment above Martini's was destroyed, who helped the displaced in the IMU even though his home was obliterated. Yep, another apathetic, drunk, idiotic piece of undergrad trash.

And you know, since the streets were so packed that night, and since law enforcement was vastly outnumbered by student pedestrians, that thousand-strong throng of students managed to pull off a totally sweet riot.

...oh wait, no we didn't. Because we're not stupid.

But we did loot, right? Actually, no, we didn't - the student who stated in Friday's DI that the Liquor House "opened like a can of tuna" was probably referring to the structure itself, which, quite frankly, did open up like a can of tuna.

I talked to the people working at the Liquor House that night, one of whom was a former coworker, and they said that looting was minimal, and that they parked a truck so as the make sure no looting would happen, and even then, most people walked by peacefully.

The downtown crowd, "mostly of University of Iowa students," didn't riot, didn't extensively loot, and didn't get arrested en masse, either.

But those guys I saw driving around the area around the 900 block of Iowa Avenue on Saturday - they were driving a pick-up truck while their friends sat in the back seat on lawn chairs, drinking beer. Heck, they looked about 50.

That's a bit old for students, isn't it?