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Jason, if you were a real man, none of this would have happened.
First and foremost, when obnoxious drunks do bad things in the middle of the night, you call the police. Beginning, middle and end of story, you call the police. If you don’t have enough guts to do this yourself, you have your girlfriend do it for you. If for some reason you don’t want to be involved, you wake up the dorm staff and let them call the police - it is their job, not yours, to deal with the drunken troublemakers in the lobby.
And where WAS the dorm staff? After an earlier racial incident, we doubled the number of ARDs so that there would always be a professional staff person available for problems in the middle of the night, problems just like this one. So where were they – were they even in the building or are they living elsewhere with their girlfriends?
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Further, Jason, do you honestly think you are the only man on this campus ever to have been provoked? Between race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, veterans status and the like, over 400% of the population is a member of at least one protected group (I personally am a member of three) and there is no shortage of myopic bigots bashing each. Even narrowing it down to race, do you honestly believe that you are the only person to encounter a racist bigot? Go talk to someone like Esther Terry (as I have) and listen to her describe her personal experiences in the Jim-Crow South. Or listen to Ward Connerly describe his (as I also have).
The late Dr. King once remarked that he was by no means a non-violent man. Instead, he said, he was a very violent man struggling to remain non-violent. It is the simplest thing in the world to grab a weapon and go "take care of" a situation in a testosterone-fueled rage, a real man of character is able to resist the urge to do it though. Character is knowing what is right, courage is the ability to do it.
Character is also in knowing that women are not personal property. The Thirteenth Amendment declared us all to be free people and women have the absolute right to speak with (and sleep with) anyone whom they please. Even if this whole thing isn’t a legacy from high school, attempting to regulate who may communicate with a woman and using violence in this regard is a textbook example of “domestic violence.” Jason, you simply can’t dictate whom a woman may or may not talk to.
And now your friends are making a fuss about how “they have taken a year of your life.” Well much as auto accidents are best avoided even if the other driver is at fault, you could have avoided this situation. None of this needed to have happened. But for your choices that night, you would be filling out medical school applications right now with two other young men either in gaol or working towards that goal.
I haven't seen the videotape so I am saying nothing about you and gaol, only that if you had picked up your phone instead of your knife, had you had remained in your room instead of going outside, none of this would have happened. None of it, and you would be sweating out med school stuff right now….
And why the ski mask? It isn't like you are going to get frostbite in a dorm lobby and it seems to me that you must not want to have been identified. Now if your intents were honorable Jason, why the need for a disguise? Why hide from the cameras if you aren't intending to do anything wrong? And why the weaponry? Why?
When I leave the safety of my room in the middle of the night, I “arm” myself with a flashlight and cellphone, not a knife and iron. I try to remember to put on shoes, not a ski mask. And if a friend of mine is potentially at risk of violence, I urge him to seek refuge for the 180 seconds it takes for the UMPD to arrive, not to nonchalantly wander alone through the midst of likely hostilities.
And why the need to stab NINE TIMES? You seriously injured those boys - a victim has to be almost on death's doorstep for the ambulance to make a "scoop & run" straight to Baystate, and even if they are the Milton Town Drunks, they still are human beings. Even with almost immediate first aid efforts, Bowes lost over a pint of blood and my emergency medicine handbook states that only a third of abdomen stab wounds will ever require surgery, let alone immediate surgery in the regional trauma center.
Wouldn't it have been better to have remained in your locked dorm room and call the cops?
And do you honestly think that you are the only one from whom “they” have taken year(s) of life? UMass is nationally infamous for obtuse and bellicose bureaucrats berating and bullying even the best of students. We rank third, nationally, for "long lines and red tape." And you think that you are the first person on this campus to have his educational progress frustrated? To have lost a year (or more) of his life? And you really think this???
I once knew another young man quite similar to you, he was majoring in AfroAm but he likely would have jumped to the IT major had it existed then. He was a RA and the level of abuse (not all of it racist in nature) that he had to endure was expedientially worse than anything your friends describe. And when he stabbed someone, it was in self defense in the confined space of a poorly configured cluster office -- he simply had no other option. And unlike your attempt to disembowel, it was a minor flesh wound to the arm of the person coming over the counter at him.
I respect that young man. In a world where far too many young men (of all races) are dying on our streets in the needless carnage of drugs, violence and stupid stuff over girls, I suggest that we should all respect the young men with enough courage to not “go ghetto.”
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