Debate has arisen over whether University of Florida police acted hastily in using a taser to restrain a student who was asking belligerent questions at a student forum hosting Sen. John Kerry last Monday. Here's the scene: Andrew Meyer, 21, approached an open microphone holding a book. John Kerry pointed to him and says, "Yes, you."

Meyer began a self-indulgent polemic, recommending Kerry to a book about voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election. He then asked about the senator's participation in the Yale secret society Skull and Bones. Meyer was obnoxious, but clearly harmless. At this point, his microphone was shut off and four policemen, who had been hovering behind him, forcibly guided him towards the door. He resisted, and within moments was being tasered on the floor of the aisle while the audience watched in shock. The police were obviously behaving inordinately, but the small audience did nothing. On this popular YouTube video, a lone woman can be heard screaming, "Why are you doing this to him?"

One man's silence was the most profound. After a painfully long minute, Kerry spoke feebly: "That's all right, let me answer his question." And he did, while Meyer writhed in pain, his voice muffled as an electric current passed through his body. For all of Kerry's invectives against the leadership capabilities of the current president, it is now our duty to hold him accountable for his failure to take command of a situation which begged the most basic form of leadership: courage.

At a time when the government seems completely insulated from public opinion, when even the democratic majority in Congress, presumably elected to end the Iraq war, refuses to act while their approval ratings free fall below 30 percent, and when Rolling Stone Magazine concludes that Bush has "stolen" a second election through fraud, it now appears that a student cannot broach any of these topic without being violently restrained.

Representative democracy has been reduced to an abstract triviality. Today, few Americans truly feel propriety over their government. They watch in cowed astonishment as their voices are silenced and as their leaders faithlessly answer to no one.

What formed in Kerry's mind as he watched this spectacle? Disgust? Outrage? Shame? Fear? His deep, authoritative voice, once heard in the jungles of Vietnam and above the megaphones of Nixon's riot police, did not ring out last Monday, calling for an end to the violence before his eyes. Perhaps, as chaos descended on the auditorium, he caught a brief glimpse of a headline that would never be published: "Kerry obstructs unlawful police brutality." The frightened screams of the audience failed to convey to him how the American people might have reacted.

Gustafsson is a Plan II senior.

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