Why not protest in goggles?

Is it really America's best and brightest - armed with a deft understanding of the function of the country - out on the streets waving signs, gettin' rowdy, "protesting"? Let's watch and see:  the commotion brings out the cops, who bring out the pepper spray...which affects the eyes. Yet, there's not a pair of goggles to be seen as the protesters are peppered into submission; the "best and brightest" statement may have been inaccurate.

This understandably puts protesters in quite a pickle. While incapacitated by the pepper spray, they are unable to accomplish their goal of bothering the rest of us with whatever their agglomeration of complaints happens to be for that day.

Coming up short of a goal is not uncommon, and not something that discriminates according to the intelligence level of those affected. The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that jazz. That said, it should come of no surprise that combining several high-achieving, idealistic youngsters with a grand undertaking (involving two enormous universities in a fundraising effort, in only eight weeks), resulted in benchmarks not being met.

As far as BiggerThanTheGame goes, our goals themselves were not unreasonable, considering the plan for the project; it was just a little on the naive side to think that our incredible amount of logistics could be coordinated in such a short time frame. This begs an interesting question; obviously it's case-by-case, but at what point does idealism begin to tread on the toes of naivety?

Having little to no experience with coordination efforts myself, the biggest thing I experienced through this project was a reality check. I thought it was reasonable for a someone to reply within twenty-four hours, as their website states. Reality check - that is actually unreasonable.

Make no mistake, BiggerThanTheGame was a success. A raucous, pool-party-worthy success. The time frame was just off by a couple of days. If we'd only had until the Sunday after the game... At this juncture, though, the important thing is being able to pick up and dust off from this little scrap with our eight-weeks-younger selves, to get back on the horse.

New goals for BiggerThanTheGame in Twenty-Twelve:  I'd say student organization status is in order, along with a sister organization at the University of Michigan. And for sure - next time "The Game" rolls around, we are going to have some t-shirts.