Why I’m glad the ‘clowns’ are here at Brown

For the past several days, after 6 PM or so, I’ve been trying to get from place to place without ever leaving a building. Although difficult, I’ve managed to minimize my time outside by navigating subterranean corridors, temperamental fire escapes, and faulty key card readers while getting to friends’ dorms or club engagements. Why you might ask: am I particularly averse to the increasingly freezing Providence climate? Do I find comfort in the stale, musty embrace of dorm building air? Am I avoiding that TA who demanded that I turn in the essay I didn’t write last week? No, none of those are true. Instead, I’m staying inside because I’d rather not get attacked by a clown.

Clown sightings in Providence have ramped up in the past week or so, with tweets like this, becoming progressively more dramatic:

At first glance, this wave of so-called “killer clowns” is a terrible thing; they’re creepy and dangerous, and they inconvenience us by making us go through the all-girls dorm to get to the dining hall. But upon further examination, it’s not all that bad. For one, I guarantee you that fewer people have been attacked by a clown than by violence in Philadelphia, my home city. So while these clowns have garnered incredible visibility (people are fascinated by anything bizarre), this is hardly a massacre.

Further yet, I’ve witnessed few things that have united the general population like murderous clowns. At colleges across the nation, from Kent State to James Madison, students have been engaging in mass clown hunts, taking to the streets to eliminate this alleged threat. But you may stop and think, “Wait a minute…bloodthirsty mobs? This can’t be a good thing,” which was my initial thought. However, I realized that one, there probably is no clown, and two, this mob is looking for someone that dressed up as a clown to victimize innocent people—which, I think, doesn’t apply to most people.

These unified students represent the best these clowns have to offer. In other words, they embody the notion that we can transcend political, social, ideological divides by uniting against an imaginary (or near imaginary) danger. This video from Penn State of freshman Michael Willis giving a speech to a clown-hunting crowd personifies that exact sentiment.

Although historically, hysteria has rarely proven to be a good thing (the Salem witch trials and lynch mobs specifically), our society is currently gripped in a hysteria of different kind, one that’s much worse. Whether it’s Islamophobia, homophobia, ableism, or intolerance of conservative views, we’ve grown accustomed to the antagonism of one group or another, and we’re split on issues of race, immigration, and transgender rights. This current election has only brought this hostility to a head, polarizing our nation like never before.

Clown sightings

An outbreak of sighting of clowns who apparently want to kill us sounds pretty awful, but in the midst of all this conflict, it may not be the worse thing.

In fact, an influx of “homicidal” clowns that make us forget about why we hate our neighbor may be just what we need.