Let this be the one picture I feel best symbolizes the event at the end of the day:
A witty fellow called to me as I took this picture: "A billion dollars. And all I got was this horse shit!"
So much horse shit.
The insane level of police presence was horse shit.
The police response (or lack thereof) to few incidents which later did happen was complete horse shit.
All of the television coverage you watched "as it happened" was utter, complete, and total horse shit.
Now to dig a bit deeper into this horse shit, if you care to.
The RCMP had blazed the trail before us, as can be seen. Along the way, the police kept us all safe from ourselves, and terrorists, by creating a cyborg corridor all along the route. But even worse and more ridiculous than all of this, was the TV coverage we were subjected to when we returned from our lovely walk out in the rain with a HUGE bunch of really nice people who care about, and think about, issues of social justice, environmental care, and economic sanity a hell of a lot more than most of the rest of us do. Some of them are a bit weird. But it's nearly always a good sort of weird. On the TV all we saw was clips of burning police cars, repeated over and over and over again, as often as could possibly be justified by someone to repeat them.
Yes, some bad stuff happened. ALL of it happened AFTER the the organized marches ended. ALL of it, from my perspective could have been stopped or at least very much limited EASILY by the police if they had cared to respond in any sort of sensible way. Apparently they prefer just hiding behind their pathetic fantasies of power, which they so proudly displayed for all the cameras all day long. I am no expert on crowd control, or public security, of course. But I was there on the ground. You can see in my pictures, I was right in the MIDDLE of those black masked kids, before they headed to Yonge Street. It was painfully obvious they were looking for trouble. And that they were mostly kids. I believed the trouble they were looking for was to be found at Toronto's Berlin wall. They soon realized it was impossible for them get anywhere near the loathsome horse shit symbol of so much that is wrong with the corrupt corporate controlled political elites of the self-appointed G20. So, angry, they turned east...
I don't know if the above is the case, but it doesn't matter anyhow. It was obvious, either way. The high priced massive security forces did virtually nothing. They seemed to have no sensible strategy to identity probable problems, and probable non-problems. They were just another big dumb retarded wall. I had thought the police were showing admirable restraint throughout the day. But towards the end of the day it turned out it was not restraint (what's a burnt police care or two against a budget of billions of dollars anyway?) so much as apparently just mental retardation.
Perhaps I should have known better from the start. I am so naive. I had thought perhaps better of Canadian police. I am so naive.
After finally getting to see camera person casually following the Yonge Street marauders as they smash a few windows... I couldn't help wonder if it was all a joke. Kids climbing into unsecured police cars and screaming on the radio. Kids trying to smash windows with a stick and failing. Kids throwing a few newspaper boxes and "recovered materials" from the street through a few windows and then moving on. I saw a kid looted a couple of oranges?! Where were those masses of cops that seemed to practically outnumber the demonstrators at times? On a bits-and-bites break?
So now we have a report (first hand from no less than TVO's Steve Paikin, and others) of insane police overreaction later this evening, including brutality (against a journalist, no less!!), and pointless arrests tonight. These are the security forces our economic overlords want to protect us from ourselves with. Or rather, protect themselves from the few of us who care enough to sacrifice a Saturday in the rain in a futile attempt to make our voices heard to them, and the rest of the dozy country... even in Canada they are morons.
But they are morons with big sticks. And even in Canada it seems, though maybe yet still not as much in other countries, the big retarded sticks don't know how to do anything except embarrass themselves at their utter uselessness at doing anything besides the only stupid thing they can do besides stand at attention, and so, embarrassed, with a vengeance, they whack, whack, whack.
These are the people my sister says the representatives of seem (and they do sometimes sound so!) so reasonable on TV. These are the people who are actually the reason the bandanna-wearing rug rats went a little crazy on Yonge Street. I am sorry, but i felt a lot safer in the middle of those black masked dudes than I did anywhere near those plexiglass-skinned idiots. And the video reporters following them, with video cameras rolling, also appeared a lot safer amidst them even as they trashed storefronts than they were when confronted with the Babies-in-Blue at a peaceful protest later that evening.
On the street things are different than on TV. On the street the symbols read differently than they are read on TV by vacuous air-filling TV talking heads.
And seriously, it shouldn't surprise anyone a bit if we learn later that some of what appeared to happen wasn't a set up... as has happened before. And that there were serious mistakes made (at least half of which we will undoubtedly never know).
I am a 100% advocate of non-violence; I do not support any violent actions (no matter how much the retarded sticks beat me to death, and their paymasters poison our environment and wreck our economies while enriching themselves). But I also think that even those stupid unarmed kids hiding behind flimsy bits of cloth on Yonge Street are a lot braver and more to be respected than the heavily armed retards hiding behind visored helmets, "just obeying orders". I'm sad to say that, and I'm sure individually most of them are very nice, decent people. Wageslaves like most of the rest of us. But I'm sorry, their corporate horse shit outweighs all that, time and time again.
I hope you all who blindly support the troops and the police feel safer after seeing the actions tonight. I, for one, do not.
The following was blogged via Torontoist a few moments ago and couldn't be more appropriate:
1:14 AM: Just circled Queen's Park, both north and south, and it's deserted. No cops at all, and no people except for two guys smoking on a park bench. Oddly, no litter at all. It's like today never happened. (Although there is some horse poop.)
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