Doug: The Illusion of Safety

So. My school had a power outage last night.

I’m not talking a flickering of the lights. I’m talking, tree falls on power line, transformer blows up, the entire grid goes dark for close to an hour. That kind of power outage.

I’m in bed, and my phone surges and lights up. My printer makes a funny noise and dies; the clock light next to my bed disappears. A god-awful explosion echoes in the street outside.

You can almost count to three in your head before the frat boys begin screaming incoherently. I roll out of bed and move to the window, peeking out. No lights visible in sight. I check my phone; it still works, so The Change hasn’t happened.
I throw on some pants and head into the hallway to check on the roomies. They’re fine. It’s still a madhouse outside. Screams, male and female, fill the air like it’s Mardi Gras. Fee’s using her phone as a light, and I remember I have a flashlight. Flicking it on, I recon the outside.

There are people running up and down 45th and 17th. It looks like the power’s out on everything east and north of us, but the main city is fine. The Greeks are setting off fireworks, some mortar shells, nothing too impressive. Things are loud, but not out of hand. Because I have drill in the morning, I go home and head back to bed after loading the AR. Can’t be too careful.

6 hours later I’m staring at a newspaper with a massive picture of a bonfire, captioned “UW students hold Midnight Bonfire During Power Outage.”

Apparently, the Greeks decided that because there were no lights on they could do whatever they liked, so a block away from my apartment a massive bonfire fed by mattresses, couches, and any other detritus they could get their hands on was created sometime around 1230. At approximately 1 am the police showed up, but not in enough force to stop the madness. At around 1:20 am, Fifty cops in Riot gear materialized out of the darkness with a fire truck. By 2, the show was over and people had gone back to bed.

This would be funny if I wasn’t thinking about what would happen if something serious occurred. Say all the power goes out, and the cops are tied up somewhere else? Would that bonfire have gotten out of hand and burned down Greek row? Possibly. Is a power outage all it takes for college students to go all “Lord of the Flies”?
I mean, we’re all civilized. Right?

-Doug

"'I should have thought that a pack of British boys... would have been able to put up a better show than that.'"
- William Golding, Lord of the Flies, Chapter 12