NEVER FORGET!
Word to the demonstrators:
You're either with U.S.
or you're with the TERRORISTS!
NO NEGOTIATIONS
NO COMMON GROUND
TERRORISTS MUST DIE.
Posted on 10/17/2001 1:03:03 PM PDT by Clive
Post-Sept. 11, clowns' antics deplorable
Protesters burn U.S. flag, slash tires: 'This is what democracy looks like'
Christie Blatchford
National Post
TORONTO - As the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty protest march was finally winding down yesterday morning, a grown man about my age with long white hair and a beatific attitude burbled with delight and remarked, because he simply could not help himself he was so delighted, "Isn't it beautiful?"
A block south, not two minutes before, I had watched as two of the young protesters had cheerfully dropped their drawers and moved their bowels on the sidewalk of a little laneway (if only they had not knocked over the symbols of the corporate media, they might have had something to read) just off University Avenue in the heart of Canada's largest city.
Now, at the downtown intersection where the burbling man and I were standing, other protesters had dragged into the street more news boxes and mailboxes and were tossing them into traffic and glaring menacingly at motorists from behind their balaclavas and kerchiefs.
"This is beautiful?" I said. "No, I don't think it is."
"I meant democracy," the man said. "I meant, isn't democracy beautiful? I was talking about the big picture."
"I'm kind of concentrating on the small one at the moment," I said, longing to slap him upside the head. "I thought you would appreciate it," he said, clearly wounded.
"I don't," I said.
"You would if you were poor," he said.
"Ah," I said, "But I'm not."
It was not the first time that I, a white woman of privilege in the employ of the right-wing warmongering National Post, have found myself the enemy in such circumstances; heaven knows, that's old hat.
What has changed is that post-Sept. 11, with the entire continent on edge and overworked emergency services personnel barely able to catch their breath as they race from one white-powder scare to another, I am disinclined to indulge these clowns now, disinclined to see my tax dollars spent on protecting my city from their fits of pique and diarrhoea (verbal and otherwise), disinclined to force myself to look benignly upon either their wanton destruction or hectoring moronic lectures, disinclined to pretend that, as went one of the chants of the day, "This is what democracy looks like!"
Actually, it wasn't. This is what the mob looks like.
This thing began before five in the morning, when a couple of buses deposited at a downtown church the protesters imported from Quebec, while a few blocks away, the imported police officers (from the neighbouring suburbs and beyond, as well as the Ontario Provincial Police) were also setting up at City Hall.
The protesters' supposed goal was to shut down Bay Street, and the heart of the financial district, but for a while in the early going, it was a case of the blind leading the blind, with some of the chief players from both sides unfamiliar enough with the city that they couldn't have found the Toronto Stock Exchange if they had walked headlong into it.
The Quebecers, singing in French as they marched, were suspiciously lumpen under their rain gear, and sure enough, it wasn't long before police searches (given the track record of this bunch, particularly at a June, 2000, protest at Queen's Park that became a full-fledged riot, coupled with the organizers' advance pledge to stop at nothing, officers would have had what's called "articulable cause") turned up such things as rocks, poles with sharpened ends, gas masks and knee pads, bottles of urine and bleach, the fixings for Molotov cocktails (empty bottles with wicks and siphon hoses), bricks, two-by-fours with sharp metal coverings, baseball bats, full beer bottles and cans of tomatoes.
This puts the lie to the disingenuous claim that the demonstration was ever planned to be a peaceful expression of dissenting opinion. The pacifist doesn't come sporting a hockey helmet or motorcycle helmet, carrying weapons and hiding his face. The thug does, and so does the coward.
So the police were out in force, and good thing, too.
Despite the formidable uniformed presence, the protesters, numbering as few as 1,000 or as many as 2,000 depending on who was doing the counting, did significant enough damage it is a safe bet that left alone, they would have laid waste to the city.
It was a snake march, the plan calling for the demonstrators to break up into several groups, try to sneak through police lines to the financial district (by now cunningly located) or to encircle smaller groups of officers, and to take over the streets and block rush-hour commuter traffic.
So around and around City Hall various groups moved, up and down Bay Street and University Avenue, stopping at every intersection to damage any vending boxes there, shriek awhile, before moving into the side streets and skyscraper corridors where, out of sight from police (and the corporate media), the sounds of breaking glass and smashing metal were always loudest.
Inside every building they circled, alarmed employees were looking out; passersby were jostled and confronted on their way to work. Whenever the mob moved into traffic, the chant of "Our streets!" would rise and cars would be damaged.
I saw someone knife the right rear tire of Paul Pittman's BMW on Richmond Street, whose only offence was to be trying to get to his office; I saw people urinating against the walls of the high-rises there; I was standing outside the graceful old Royal York Hotel when a masked teenager clambered up the façade and proceeded to spray the American flag atop the front entrance with, "Stop Murder" and then try to set it afire. He clambered back down into the outstretched arms of his hooting friends, a hero. In front of the U.S. embassy, protesters tossed police barricades into the road.
For four long hours, they roamed like this throughout the streets, the police exercising restraint that was both admirable and ridiculous. (One motorist, furious at the youths who had clambered up on the hood of his car, denting it, said he phoned 911 to ask for help. "They told me I should have taken a different route," he said, bewildered.) The only arrests -- there were about 40 -- appeared to have been made by plainclothes officers or regular, non-riot-equipped constables, who would try to cut from the crowd those they had spotted vandalizing property earlier.
In front of The Hospital for Sick Children, a couple of protesters were subdued and arrested. The phalanx of riot police marching up from the south appeared to arrive just in time, for the crowd had turned on a handful of plainclothes officers. I saw one officer in a yellow rain jacket picking himself up from the ground after taking a flying kick to the head from a big-booted demonstrator.
On another occasion, plainclothes officers arrested a handful of protesters in an alley; I saw a well-dressed man of about 45, wearing a long coat, blow his whistle for the rest of the throng to join the fray.
Often, following those who were doing most of the damage, were clutches of smiling young women, who would wrestle the mailboxes out of the road and try to right them, or murmur gentle admonitions of, "This isn't helping our cause" in the offenders' wake.
That was ... what? The march was, judging by the words and actions of those in it, against poverty, homelessness, The Racist War, Americans, Starbucks, the corporate media, Mike Harris, the Tory agenda, cuts to social services, the minimum wage, BMWs, people with jobs, and, like, Society. Unlike the police, they didn't have articulable cause, and whenever I heard anyone try to explain why they were there, I could feel my head going numb with the clichés.
Who they were, why they appear as angry as the folks in the streets of Islamabad, why they believe it is all right to damage property private and public, I couldn't tell you.
"We're activists, not terrorists," one teenager had scrawled on the back of his jacket. You could have fooled me.
Word to the demonstrators:
You're either with U.S.
or you're with the TERRORISTS!
NO NEGOTIATIONS
NO COMMON GROUND
TERRORISTS MUST DIE.
It was for groups such as this that God inspired Hiram Maxim to invent the machine gun. My sympathies to the police officers who had to endure this bunch.
Your heart is in the right place but it is time to engage in more decisive tactics on those who think they can blugeon liberty with violence disguised as protest.
Stay well - Stay safe
Mobocracy is more like it ... just like James Madison indicated democracy would become.
An adult should have come along and treated them like dogs by rubbing their noses in their own excrement.
just in case you'd be interested,
here are some pics from the Freep in DC.
maybe you'll find yourself amongst us. J
Cleveland
Perhaps if I try hard, I can think of a few more.
Oh, yes, and oldie but a goodie:
Chicago
I beg to differ. MORONacracy would be more fitting.
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