This is going to be a rant, dear reader. A long and arduous one about morality, law, taxes, and such. So if you’re not into that kinda thing, you may want to avert your gaze now. Well, maybe you may wanna stick around for the few pictures but the rest of the post will be a tough slog otherwise.
Okay?
Good.
So let’s talk about this concept of the straight and narrow, shall we?
Had big plans for this weekend: go down to see Caribanna, soak up the sunshine, restock my new photo collection. But fate’s a bitch, ain’t she?
At around 9 p.m. on Saturday night I started to get a migraine. No biggie, I thought, usually lasts a few hours, I’ll be right as rain tomorrow. By 2 a.m. I’d emptied the contents of my stomach from the pain, couldn’t quite see out of my left eye, and just wasn’t having a good time. Not good at all.
Yes, I have to admit that believing me to be dead would be a natural conclusion at this point. The gears have all but ground to a halt here at TCL, the Toronto City Life Twitter feed has barely seen the light of day over the past couple of weeks, and for all intents and purposes I may as well be pushing up the digital daisies.
“This is just glorious!”, exclaimed the unidentified cyclist as we stood in the middle of Jarvis Street, referring to the empty center lane he was casually occupying.
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Okay, it’s now been well over two weeks and I’m just about ready to put this puppy to bed.
But before I do, let me round out the G20 weekend for you, dear reader. Let’s start with the Black Bloc, the attention whores of the summit. While I was trying to figure out who they are and where they came from, a few glaringly obvious pieces of evidence jumped out at me with a, “zut alors!”
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One of the most iconic images of the G20 riots a couple of weeks ago was the that of the burning police car. You know the one:
Of course there was nudity again this year. Just more seemingly painful nudity. But I’ll let you be the judge. First try to find it. Then try not to cringe.
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It’s mostly the rhetoric and misinformation guiding the protest that I take exception to. After all, people were just expressing themselves and exercising their right to peaceful protest which, much to John Clarke’s chagrin, ended up actually being peaceful. There were a few arrests made along the route, that’s true, but I suspect they involved the kind of people that would get arrested any old day, protest or not.
For most of us on the street the Friday afternoon was more like a parade.
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On a scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being granola-popping tie-dyed hippies, and 3 being black bloc anarchists, the OCAP (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty) protesters on Friday would probably rate at 2. Not outright violent instigation, but prepared to throw a few punches.
You may have already seen the video in which John Clarke bluntly states, “they have given us war, we’re looking to give them war back”, and “things are not gonna to be peaceful”. This speech was given prior to the march and these quotes weren’t taken out of context. Mr. Clarke further urged protesters not to be afraid of the police which, during this protest march, made their presence clear.
I had to see it for myself, dear reader. I knew that nothing like it would be in town for, potentially, the rest of my life. So I had to see it for myself.
I am, of course, referring to the G20 summit that shut down most of Toronto over the weekend. I’m sure most people are now well aware of the outrageous costs surrounding the event and I wanted to see what kind of security that kind of money could buy. Even more than that, I wanted to see how the situation would be handled.
At every one of these meetings there are accusations of police brutality, protest situations getting out of hand, riot police, riot police, and more riot police. I needed to see the instigators for myself and not have to rely on either the media, the police, or the protesters for the facts – they could be quite skewed in all directions. The only way I can say anything with authority is to be right there between the riot police and the balaclava’d opposition.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Lots of stuff happened over the weekend but plenty happened before that. There were a number of protest marches and demonstrations throughout the city that, unfortunately, were lost in the subsequent shuffle. There were also a couple of related news items that I think are worth mentioning.
Despite some of the images you may have seen coming out of Toronto over the past few days, the vast majority of the protests and protesters were entirely peaceful.
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