After watching a video on youtube.com (a few of them) of Andrew Meyer being forced to the ground and tased, one has to wonder why it took six buffed police officers (2 policewomen) to restrain this young guy, and why did they have to tase him? No matter if his questions to Kerry seemed provocative and loaded, the problem here is the Gestapoesque way the police handled the situation. This young man was in no way posing a danger or threat to Senator Kerry or anyone for that matter, so why the brutality? What has our country come to when Peace Officers resort to such brutish means to keep the peace? I must have watched the Meyer video a dozen times in order to make sure I didn’t miss any small detail in this disastrous fracas. But I kept seeing the same tyrannical method of operandi used by the police. Meyer can be heard screaming out: “Help me, someone help me!” I’m confused here, aren’t the police supposed to assist someone in need of help?

The President of the University of Florida, J. Bernard Machen, described the event as “regretful” and said two officers in the incident were placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Somehow, suspension is not the answer to the problem.

Now, I’m sure that the police, with all their training and skills, could have done something else to encourage Meyer to leave the premise in a peaceful way. He may be a prankster and an instigator but he didn’t deserve the roughshod treatment to which he was subjected. This incident is not the only shameful display of police brutality. There are dozens of reported police harassment cases. Yet, in every barrel of apples there are a few bad ones. I am not trying to judge the Police Association in general, but there seems to be a dark pattern of behavior and that is what I find eerily mysterious. Are they operating out of fear all the time? Have they seen too much violence and their minds are tainted with disgust and intolerance? Or are they on a power trip? There is a lot of power in wielding a badge and bearing a firearm. Just the sight of them walking a beat or cruising a neighborhood is enough to make an innocent person behave as if they did something wrong.

In the end, if there is something urgent and I need to call for police assistance. I will do so because I still trust them, and I also know that they risk their lives many times in the line of duty. However, a man or a woman who wears a badge and carries a firearm is supposed to be mentally, not just physically, fit to do so. The people who choose to become Peace Officers or Law Enforcers know the inherent risks involved with the job, but that does not place them above the law. Perhaps they should take some needed R&R and seek help when they are feeling too overwhelmed in doing their jobs properly. Keeping the peace seems impossible to achieve when the balance of power is skewed heavily on one side, then it becomes oppression. People always react to oppression in one way or another. I hope I don’t have to read or write anymore stories like this one, ever again. I hope that this is not wishful thinking.

A new study is out claiming that men are just as chatty as women with women using only 3% more words each day than men, perhaps not in the same context, but nevertheless, it’s a close finish.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers led by Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, Arizona, where 210 female and 186 male students were recruited as subjects for their work. The volunteers were each fitted with a digital device called the “electronically activated recorder” (EAR), which records 30 seconds of sound every 12.5 minutes. The students wore the device up to ten days as they went about their daily activities.

After collecting all the sound files, Mr. Mehl’s team estimated that women utter an average of 16,215 words per day, whereas men speak an average 15,669 words. There was at least one male who managed to utter just 500 words in a day, whilst the chattiest chap of the lot spoke a jaw-dropping 47,000 words in a day. Talk about the strong chatty type.

As Matthias Mehl stated in his article published in the journal, Science, “The stereotype of female talkativeness is deeply engrained in western folklore and often considered a scientific fact.” Mehl’s research findings could counter that assertion as well as the claim made by Louann Brizendine, a neuro-psychiatrist, that women speak 20,000 words each day and have a tendency to be more gossipy whilst the male gender utters only 7,000, thus less talkative.

According to linguist, Alice Freed at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, who says that the caricature of the gossipy gal can have a truly negative effect: “The power of the stereotype is that women are considered to speak too much.” She says that this stereotype emerged as a way to devalue what women had to say.

I’m sure the origins of that caricature must have started long ago, perhaps in the days of our earliest civilizations. Even if we go back 50 years, we will see that our young men were conditioned to be physically competitive at a very early age, thus encouraging them to adopt a “winner take all” attitude in business, in sports, in politics and overall dominance. Whereas, the females at an early age were conditioned to be the nurturers, to look attractive, be well educated and to support the man, marry and raise children. Maybe the difference in conditioning engendered a specific speech pattern that had to fit in with the disparate type of environments. Men plotting, scheming, cajoling each other and women conversing, commensurating and gabby with other fem types. Men thinking that what women had to say was domestic and women thinking that what men had to say was too worldly to fit in with the daily chores of washing, cooking, cleaning, and minding the brood.

But what does it matter if women’s utterances are of a light nature about family, the latest health or fashion trends or about romance? Don’t you think this type of conversation is a lot better than plotting and scheming to commit acts of violence or cruelty against humanity, which in most cases are always carried out by men? I’m most certain women also discuss at length, the seriousness of the state our world is in, the possibility of more wars, about the endless struggle of the people in Africa, the middle-East and about “what is our purpose here?” just like men discuss.

What I do mind is when being talkative gets branded as being gossipy. Gossip is when one person reveals secrets or intimacies to another person about someone else behind their back, which of course the information gets lost in translation ending up being as far from the truth as the War in Iraq. So, I do not consider being talkative or chatty in the same vein as being gossipy. Although, I do know that there are women who are typical of the “gossipy old hen” like Gladys Kravitz was in the Bewitch sitcom. And there are those felines with long fangs and sharp claws that can be as lethal with malicious gossip as the old adage purports them to be — but men can be bitchy as well.

However, before the sisterhood can bask in glory that their male counterpart is just as chin-wagging as we were once reputed to be, the jury is still out. Mehl and his colleagues have concluded that further research is necessary in order to confirm that older men and women also talk about the same amount as the young students they had researched.

At the end of the day, whether it is an utterance of a man or a woman’s, or whether it is serious or light-hearted, let it be true and clear and not malicious or vengeful.

Happy Utterances!