Humarock July 3rd Shutdown Has Ominous Implications

Humarock will be closed to revelers on July 3rd. Citing "historical" cycles of drinking and teen rabble-rousing, the Scituate selectmen voted to nix the holiday revelry.

Nothing says "Happy Birthday America" like radically curtailing personal freedoms, right?

Humarock's beach, along with other coastal villages like Green Harbor and Duxbury Beach, have for decades been host to massive Independence Day celebrations on July 3rd (the 4th, in these parts, are reserved for fireworks shows in other towns like Plymouth). These celebrations feature family parties, heroic drinking, Gettysburg-style gunpowder expenditure, roving gangs of teenagers, Dresden-like bonfires and twelve hour adult drunks. It tends to get a bit rowdy, even for the Irish Riviera.

Police naturally tire of the annual Night Of Action on these beaches, and the simple solution is to shut the party down. Seems like a good idea, no?

Most bad ideas usually do at the time they are thought up. Very few people who aren't in Congress, think "That sounds like it will backfire catastrophically, let's try it out."

The upside of the beach closure is instantly apparent. A giant, wild party will be shut down.

Let's examine the downside, shall we?

Humarock is setting a precedent that will be adopted all along the coast. A century worth of tradition can be erased by a mere wet blanket of a selectmen group... especially if they own property in the former party zone. Something that many people take for granted can be snatched away with a private vote of five people or so.

The gentrification of the Irish Riviera is never more apparent than it will be tonight in the Riviera's capital of Humarock. It's not like today's people party harder than yesteryear's. I'd take some 1968 LSD gang of student radicals over today's millennial kids in a Gettin' Rowdy contest, and I'd also wager on my own kegs-and-kegs-of-beer 1980s compatriots.

It's the people who have changed, as well as the demographics and the style of governing. Many of the cottages we remember from 1950-1990 are now 3 story beach mansions that only a wealthy person could afford. The elite, even in a town like Duxbury where the ceiling is high but the floor isn't that low, tend to not reflect the will of the people. However, they do have disproportionate influence in government. The mick with the shanty cottage won't be hosting the next campaign fundraiser, if you catch my drift.

Lacking that connection with the people and certainly not about to go forth and mingle with the rabble, the pols and elite lose touch with some of the things that make living in town special.

The beach closure won't aid public safety that much. If they were serious about this being a public safety issue, maybe they would order the bars to stop serving alcohol on a night when many people will be walking down dark roads with no sidewalks or streetlights. I'd wager that Scituate's many taverns and bars have a higher body count than her July 3rd revelry.

Somehow, I don't see the need for public safety being THAT important to the people who make laws these days. Business is business, after all.

I don't think that it will lower arrests, or even curtail the teen presence. Many teens don't peruse the news every day, and will be unaware of the ban. Many will be lying to their parents about where they are headed, and will simply get dropped off down the road some before wandering into the party area.

Police will stop the first wave, but it takes time to chase off (and especially arrest) a gang of kids. It takes less time for another gaggle to pop up just around the corner. Police resources are finite, and the law could soon be overwhelmed.

This is especially true in that kids who aren't allowed in Humarock are going to turn up somewhere else, leaving police with a choice of "Let two cops try to control Humarock while we respond to kids turning up in large numbers in other parts of town" or the far more ominous "In order to protect Humarock, we're going to abandon policing of other beaches in town. Make your own law on Scituate Neck, folks!"

Kids who are turned away will be free to choose a new spot, in parts of town that will hardly be policed at all. Kids who wander into Humarock will get nonsense trespassing arrests, at the expense of chaos in other parts of town.

If the town does manage to cover all of the real estate, it  seems logical to assume that the same amount of kids will be arrested, just in different parts of town. We're left with a ceiling of "we arrest people in other parts of town now" and a floor of "white riot.' Neither of these seem like a benefit worth gutting a cherished holiday celebration over.

This closure could even hurt property values and rental rates. July 4th is the peak week for renting cottages, and the block party is the engine that drives it. "The town square has a barbershop quartet tonight" doesn't pull the same weight as "Relive your childhood for $3000 a week."

Again, if you are an elite not dependent on rental income to maintain your property, this tradition matters little to you. The ban may actually squeeze some of the rabble out of the neighborhood, in favor of the more acceptable rich man who will snatch up his property.

As we said before, you can't fault the police for wanting to control a ZooMass-style block party, but this beach closure sounds a lot like the downside always expressed in giant asteroid impact movies when someone mentions exploding the asteroid with a nuclear weapon... rather than a million ton asteroid hitting the planet all at once, we instead get the same weight hitting the planet in a buckshot-like manner. You get just as much damage, at least in a F=MA sense.

Humarock seems to be headed in this direction. After them, Marshfield, Duxbury, Plymouth, Cape Cod... it can only happen if you let it happen, people.