The Rough Streets of Cambridge

I watched the last half-inning of last week’s American League Championship Series in my common room, with what may have been the worst-informed baseball audience on the eastern seaboard. Periodically, someone would ask which team had scored the last point; peering intently at the television, one of my roommates said, “Wait—there are Asian baseball players?” When the game ended, we threw open the windows and listened to the shouts echoing across the Winthrop courtyard. “Whoo,” we said, perfunctorily.

Then—although we had papers to write and although none of us had what you could call a vested interest in the fate of the Red Sox—we wandered out into Harvard Square. En route, we saw a police car zooming along Mt. Auburn St., its megaphone on. “The Red Sox are going to the World Series!” the policeman inside yelled over and over again, his voice amplified and distorted. When we got to Mass. Ave., we followed the crowds streaming into Harvard Yard; drunken undergraduates were massed around the John Harvard statue cheering on the band, which had ranged itself on the steps of University Hall. We kept running into people we knew. “Whoo,” we’d say to them. “Whoo!” they’d yell back. People with the vague impression that they ought to be participating in some sort of celebratory destruction were carrying traffic cones they’d stolen. There was a lot of milling around. A guy ran through the yard yelling, “Let’s go break shit!” Nobody followed him. The shouting grew ragged. There was lots of fist-pumping and inarticulate yells, including abortive attempts at a chanted “Yankees suck.” One of my roommates said, “I feel like I should be singing the score of Les Misérables.” I said, “I want the revolution.” The mood was oddly nihilistic, although perhaps we were just projecting.

After a while, the crowd drifted into the Square. We drifted with them, shouting periodically. Cars and trucks drove by with their windows open and horns bleating. The band had migrated to the Pit and begun to play an uneven version of “Dirty Water.” People climbed on top of the T stop, on top of garbage cans and on top of the information booth. I heard one thirty-ish man say to his friend, “Oh, to be in college again.” After a while, Cambridge policemen in comical riot gear—round helmets, vests, nightsticks—shined their flashlights up at the people standing on the information booth and told them to get down, please. They did. The band played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and everyone sang along, with emphasis on the “one, two, three strikes you’re out” part. Eventually the crowd thinned, and we wandered home.

With our sobriety and our lack of Sox zealotry, we had not been the ideal demographic for the celebration. Still, the riot—if you could call it that—had felt strangely inadequate. Yes, there had been an infectious, cathartic energy—but there had also been an unsettling undercurrent of emptiness. The same where-do-we-go-now, what-do-we-do-now mood that characterizes many of our Friday and Saturday night peregrinations had pervaded the Yard and the Square. A shared elation had demanded outlet, but the outlet had proved unsatisfying. (At least it had lacked the violence to prove dangerous; the fate of the poor Emerson student killed by Boston policemen’s “non-lethal weapons” demonstrates the danger of rowdier celebrations.)

The spontaneity of the celebration, though, and the man whom I overheard waxing nostalgic about college, suggests that young people are predisposed to this sort of gathering and shouting. I cannot explain, really, what compelled us to cross Mass. Ave. into Harvard Yard, or what compelled us to convene in the Square; I cannot explain what compelled us to shout, full-throated and earnest, about the victory of a team I frankly dislike. There may have been a sort of mass hypnosis at work—the sort of workaday hypnosis often wrought by alcohol and lots and lots of young people in the same place.

So what was missing on Wednesday night? Why was our celebration of our status as mostly temporary residents in Red Sox Nation somehow insufficient? I think we were primed for something more important than celebration, as we crowded Harvard Yard. The drunken guy inviting us to go break shit articulated a collective, inchoate desire for change—for some sort of change. Students cannot gather in the street, flanked by police in riot gear, without summoning up ghosts of Paris in ’68, of Tiananmen Square, of Kent State. And compared with these ghosts, we seemed awfully callow. We are capable of gathering, of shouting slogans, of stopping traffic. Shouldn’t we do so to some end?

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.