Is it just me????? Or are the Quabbin Seven the complete idiots they appear to be?

The other day, a group of UMass and Smith College students were found meandering around Quabbin Reservoir a bit after midnight.

The UMass students were chemical engineers, just graduating with masters degrees. No word on what the Smith-ies were studying.

Apparently none of the brigade were long on common sense.

Quabbin Reservoir, for those not from around here, is a quite beautiful place in the western part of Massachusetts. In my guidebook,it’s one of the prettiest places in the state. Quabbin was created in the late 1930’s to provide drinking water for Greater Boston and, interestingly, required several small towns to be disappeared. I’m not 100% certain, but I believe that from the air, you can see the ghost outlines of the foundations from those towns of yore.

Anyway, given that it provides water to an awful lot of folks in Massachusetts, it’s a very important part of our infrastructure. One that we want to keep safe, secure, and sippy-cup delicious. (We do, by the way, enjoy really wonderful water in our fair state. When we were kids and visited our relatives in Chicago, we were all gacked-out by the taste of that city’s water, which was sweet water compared to the well water we drank once when we visited some friends of the family who lived on a farm in Wisconsin. I remember the Rogers kids struggling mightily not to do a spit-take on the lemonade that we were served.)

Anyhow, the students who were apprehended poking around Quabbin in the dark happened to be from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Singapore.

Now, if you were a student from a country that was either the home country of the 9/11 bombers or had housed Osama Bin Laden.

And if you knew that people in the US in general, and – these days – in Massachusetts in particular, were (fairly or unfairly) fairly suspicious of people from those countries.

And if you were studying in a state that had just been whip-sawed by a couple of miserable jihadists who’d hijacked our very own, very best holiday, Patriots Day, and killed four innocent people, including a sweet and adorable 8-year old boy, and maimed hundreds of others.

Would you go in the dead of night to a somewhat secured reservoir to poke around because, as chemical engineers, you had a ‘career interest’ in it?

Anyhow, the Quabbin Seven are facing trespassing charges. And while they may very well be completely innocent of any malfeasance past, present, or future; any terrorist intent; or even any evil thoughts, they will now surely be facing some scrutiny by the FBI, will they not? And surely the INS will be taking a look and seeing whether any of these students may be outstaying their welcome.

I know that young folks can be foolish and impulsive. That sometimes it just seems like a good thing to hop in the car and head to the Res to look around on a nice spring night when school’s out.

But unless you wanted to be deliberately provocative, or are up to no good, would you do this?

What a bunch of nimrods.

And people call us Massholes?

Seriously, folks.