Prepare for the single greatest steel cage match of the century. Four days of blood, guts and primal screams will fill a 28,000-square-foot zone surrounded by chain link and dressed with razor wire. Finally, the box has returned to Boston.\nJust outside the FleetCenter where presidential candidate John Kerry will greet his party for the Democratic National Convention, protesters are livid with the decision to confine all demonstrators to an official area with all the aesthetic niceties of an Iron Maiden concert.\n"We don't deserve to be put in a detention center, a concentration camp," Medea Benjamin of San Francisco told the Associated Press on July 24. "It's tragic that here in Boston, the birthplace of democracy, our First Amendment rights are being trampled on."\nAnd while it's fun to see such rhetoric used against the party that invented it, we must note that the protesters' case isn't exactly worth much of our outrage.\nFor starters, since 1992, such designated demonstration zones have been the norm at the national political conventions. Why this year should be any different is beyond us.\nThe Chicago convention of 1968 is now our template for how heated ideals can cause much injury and chaos. If one throws into the equation our current environment of constant terror alerts and overall anxiety, perhaps the protesters are lucky that their zone wasn't relocated to Boston, Texas.\nTruth be told, the welded-shut manholes and countless security cameras don't exactly scream "democracy in action," but neither did the crowd's behavior on Sunday when they assaulted an anti-gay, anti-abortion protester. Regardless of how much we disagree with his message, such rash responses only solidify administrators' resolve to heighten security further as they make such decisions like lowering the maximum number of protesters from 4,000 to 1,000 and closing down interstates. \nIdeologically, we are hard pressed to reconcile the designation of demonstration zones and their aura of temporary detention centers with the democratic process. However, these events take place in real time, not between the pages of Toqueville. As such, we must take into account our nature when we are organized in large groups under the banners of political "truths." Such ingredients are fuel for disaster and sudden bursts of mob-rule that go beyond Democrat and Republican. They branch out into the animal, our most intrinsic of party loyalties.\nPerhaps if we deserved it, we would rally for changes in such regulations. The sad fact of the matter is that we don't.
The IDS Editorial Board voted 11-0.
