Hamptons Police Blotter: War on New Year’s
Police were on call for crowd control on Monday as a group of local activists staged an angry demonstration in Southampton denouncing what they see as attempts to tamper with the message and meaning of New Year’s.
Chanting slogans like “It isn’t 2015 till the clock strikes 12” and “Clocks are the reason for the season,” protestors expressed unhappiness over what one described as “a wishy-washy, loosey-goosey liberal reinterpretation of the what New Year’s really means.” The protestor went on: “We believe that New Year’s is about that point in time when a region’s arbitrarily but uniformly set clocks reach midnight on what we arbitrarily agree to call December 31, and everyone the world over arbitrarily agrees to call the next year-long period of time by an arbitrarily set number. How dare they tamper with that!”
Another protestor noted, “Some people don’t even stay up until midnight, instead toasting and ‘ringing in the new year’ at 10 o’clock on December 31, or even earlier. They just don’t get it!” Many protestors singled out senior citizen communities and nursing homes for special condemnation, citing “so-called New Year’s parties” where “phony ball-drops are staged as early as 6 p.m.”
One tearful protestor, who described herself as “very emotional” about the subject, summed it up this way, “It’s like they’re trying to do away with time itself. How can they do this to New Year’s?”