A tipping point. Photo: Mike Carlson-Reuters
Everyone knew this was a possibility. We joked about it for weeks. There were 100,000 fans in downtown Vancouver for Game 7. Lets admit some of them wanted to riot.
Even if we had won, a car would have burned, but positive energy would have easily snuffed out the negative. We lost. 95% of people went home. Everyone who stayed wanted a riot. They wanted an outlet for their negative energy, and swallowed anyone who intervened (Burn the truck!).
When there are 1000 cameras at the ready, there will always be 100 people willing to act. The roles were written in 1994, but now the audience is global. Welcome to the digital age, the digital stage. Don’t forget your mask.
With a few exceptions, the journalism has been embarrassing. I’m not sure what else I expected. At least there’s YouTube. It’s nothing more than an interesting side note, but I’m really thrown by the media’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge that there is pleasure to be found in destruction. (Or is that just me?) Click the photo, look at the crowd. Everyone is smiling. People were cheering then, and they were cheering hours later.
This was group of people with collective permission to take advantage of an opportunity. Once started, riots generate their own momentum. If there were anarchists involved, they knew this.
But really, anarchists? It was a sentence out of a dystopian novel. Don’t worry, you still have the option to blame the whole thing on your private fear of choice. What is the antithesis of the police? Anarchists. What is the antithesis of wealthy urbanites? Surrey kids. You can find out a lot about people from their demon of choice.
The city’s psychological reaction has been more violent than the riot itself.—Scramble to establish distance. Blame the other. Lust for punishment.—The rioters took glee in apolitical property destruction. Now we rush to inflict far more permanent damage on their lives. Not for breaking windows, but for shattering the holy grail, our city’s image and reputation.
Who is more guilty, the person who smashes a window, burns a car, or the people watching, encouraging with their cameras? The energetic outing of people you know to police via photos and video reeks of a guilty conscience. They are closer to us than we would like to admit, so as always, we rely on the police to distance us from our problems.
What’s done is done. If everyone had simply gone home, this wouldn’t have happened. Now we have a much more interesting situation, and a choice: Spread ignorance, paranoia, condescension, and condemnation. Forget the whole thing. Or take the opportunity to talk about what this failure says about us, our city and our culture. Like they say, “We are all Canucks.”
