Opinion: CU community must face a reckoning from Hill riot

On Saturday, March 6, Boulder saw its first crack of warm weather for the season. As the sunny weekend day progressed, thousands of my peers from the University of Colorado flocked to the Hill neighborhood for an impromptu party. By the time the sun went down, that soon turned into a riot, complete with smashed cars, injuries and, as is typical in the times of COVID-19, lethal potential for a superspreader event.

What would have been, in normal times, a day likely filled with innocent outdoor recreation, was instead a hotbed for an irresponsible, destructive scene that will leave a disturbing stain on the fabric of Boulder for a long time. Though it’s easy to place singular blame on the Boulder Police Department for responding too little and too late, CU administration for failing to properly penalize the rioters,

Boulder Greek life, which has played host to controversial gatherings before, or of course, the rioters themselves, I’d call for something else entirely. It’s time for the entire CU community to face a significant reckoning for what happened if the university is to ever properly move forward.

I initially noticed what was developing in the early afternoon of March 6, randomly scrolling past a scene of a packed and maskless curbside gathering on an acquaintance’s Snapchat story. I quickly screenshotted what was posted and decided to share my findings on Twitter, blurring the person’s name out as I shared. After all, I wasn’t in the business of exposing anyone personally. I was simply trying to spread awareness of a gathering that was quickly developing mere minutes from my Boulder apartment.

Though I am a journalism student and have covered the challenges of the pandemic for months now in many pieces, I wasn’t reporting on this particular event for any publication. I instead phrased my findings as something much more impassioned than a mere breaking news assignment. I was speaking from the core, as a disturbed Boulder resident and CU student.

“Looks like there’s a mask-less party on the Hill in Boulder,” I wrote. “Awful, awful look when we’re this close to the end of the pandemic. What can be done?”

Though I wasn’t the first, and I certainly wasn’t the only person sharing similar calls to action on Twitter, I quickly realized that we were a minority. Or at least, it seemed like it. My replies quickly transformed from a small pool of other concerned CU peers to a vast sea of pushback against my accountability, personal attacks, and threats.

“Great way to get your car keyed, Ben,” wrote one commenter.

“You should change your name to rat-fink police informer,” added another.

These tweets weren’t just from one demographic: I wasn’t just receiving hate from pissed-off frat boys, nor was I being scorned by the “anti-maskers” who hold a distaste for government-enforced public health guidelines. No, from what I could gather, the people who failed to condemn this gathering were from a broad, broad cross-section of the Boulder community. Many people across the social media spectrum on CU’s Reddit page, as well as various Twitter threads and Instagram accounts, were quicker to treat the event like a sports game than the riot it was. Accounts like Barstool Buffs and their “block party recap video,”which has garnered thousands of likes and dozens of comments, show just how deep the favor for harmful conduct runs sometimes.

When I first began writing my opinions on the events of March 6, I was looking for a more investigative edge, looking to place the blame for the event on one particular group. Wouldn’t it just be easy to label the Hill riot as just another fraternity-led misfire? Or have a quick Google search yield a manifesto from the party organizers on social media? After all, accountability for disturbing events is reassuring. In any type of narrative, we feel comfort when the root of the problem is quickly identified and stamped out.

But maybe the fact that we look readily for a scapegoat means that we’re unwilling to confront an uncomfortable truth: the destructive social scene of Boulder is far too pervasive to lump away into any one corner.

As an undergraduate student who is hesitant to indulge too far into self-righteousness, I’ve often noticed that much of the university’s identity is built upon anti-intellectualism and a tendency towards the disorderly, a tendency that goes further than those affiliated with Greek life. Placing the blame on that small sub-section of the school would be naive and unfair.

Instead, I empathize with the entire student body. I understand the craving for normalcy that many seek during a pandemic that’s now eclipsed just over a year, stealing over a quarter of the fleeting college experience for most. However, since the onset of the state of Colorado’s shutdown almost a year ago, CU students have had months to learn how to adapt to a new normal. If students were to return to campus while the virus still ravaged the United States, they would have to abide by a set of guidelines clearly laid out by the university in its “Protect Our Herd” initiative.

Though I was hesitant to return to campus for the school year, I did so anyway. I hoped the entire summer of 2020 spent masked up, distanced and sanitized would properly season my peers for what to expect back in Boulder. Maybe the school year could have been a chance for us to prove we could be something more and rise to the demands of the virus.

And as it turns out, I was too naive. The small salvages on an in-person or hybrid semester has proved to be little more than a breeding ground for blatant community health violations. Though one could say that everyone in my position only had themselves to blame, I’d refute that notion by saying “Protect Our Herd” essentially exists as a contract for us to abide by if we were to live, work and play in Boulder during the school year. Looking back, I could clearly see it coming, but I was shocked by the readiness of so many CU students to take the contract they’d been handed and burn it to the ground.

The fuel to the flame, in a sense, is the ineffectiveness of the school’s pandemic response, compounded by the sheer amount of Boulder students who blatantly ignored every counsel, guideline and rule given to them. Many of these students who attended the riot will walk free throughout the Boulder community, infecting senior citizens, cashiers, frontline workers, commuters and their peers with potentially asymptomatic spread of the virus. They’ll never be identified, never face accountability for their actions, and as such, will never learn. If another party-turned-riot were to erupt, I’d bet on their willingness to head to the Hill all over again.

While the Boulder community faces an overwhelming task of contract tracing, making arrests and cleaning up the physical damage done on March 6, the university community must face a lofty reckoning: how did we let CU’s culture come to this point?