Not the kind of thing most people do sober.
I guess I do have something to say on the subject, after all. I’m only writing this because I haven’t heard anybody really talking about it, though it’s possible it’s been brought up somewhere.
In the sober days following the embarrassing downtown devastation of one of Canada’s prettiest cities, teenagers have come forward to admit their transgressions and plead for mercy from the general public. Those youthfully exuberant weapons-wielding teenage anarchists fuelled by liquid courage—or cowardice as the case may be—have now recovered from their booze binging and in the remorseful light of day are ashamed of their actions.
I don’t really have any sympathy for the people who, though admittedly caught up in the delirious excitement of destroying private and public property, decided to do things as stupid as stuffing a t-shirt into a police car fuel tank and light it on fire. There are some fairly predictable results to lighting things on fire, and even alcohol doesn’t mentally impair one to the extent that it isn’t obvious.
But who really didn’t see this coming? We here in Vancouver had been joking half-seriously about the 2011 riot for months leading up to the actual day. We knew the chances were that the Canucks would make the Stanley Cup final again, and that if they lost there would be a very high likelihood of violence and carnage.
It certainly didn’t help that Vancouver’s naive leaders decided it would be as harmless as the Olympics to invite hundreds of thousands of partisan fans downtown to witness their brutal Game 7 drubbing at the hands of the Boston Bruins. Whoever thought that was a good idea, or didn’t anticipate the worst possible consequences, should be given a desk job next to a public men’s room, considering everybody with an IQ hovering above 70 knew exactly what was going to happen.
Downtown Vancouver is the perfect storm for a riot, mainly because the choke points in the city make it almost impossible to quickly disperse large crowds. The south and western sides of the downtown core are only accessible by bridges, which means once the riot was underway and the only path out of the city was packed SkyTrain (buses were cancelled), the ensuing bottleneck of bystanders was inevitable. To figure that out all you’d have needed was a map.
But all of this has been dredged up before in recent days. What hasn’t been discussed as much is the exacerbating effects alcohol had on the whole affair. And despite the fact the police closed the liquor stores as early as 4 p.m., most, if not all, of the rioters were blottoed, blasted, blitzed and bombed.
If the Canucks Riot 2011 isn’t a glaring indictment of the harmful effects of alcohol addiction, I really just don’t know what is. The fact that close to 100,000 people went on a collective bender of self-destructive mayhem and carnage all had the common ingredient of beer or liquor is a fairly tell-tale sign that we, as a people, need to curtail our happy hours just a little bit.
When you consider the idea that the worst social aspect of the illegal drug marijuana is it makes people lazy, snack-prone and slow-witted, it still seems utterly benign in comparison to the kind of chaos that alcohol is capable of creating. I mean, this is something that is responsible for murder, assault, riots, vehicular homicide and rape on a fairly regular basis all over the world.
We could play the hindsight game and talk about the police presence, the lack of preparedness and a dozen other factors until we’re blue in the face, but what it really comes down to is that we, as a society, have a drinking problem. Canucks Riot 2011 was just the worst manifestation of it.
It certainly didn’t help that Vancouver’s naive leaders decided it would be as harmless as the Olympics to invite hundreds of thousands of partisan fans downtown to witness their brutal Game 7 drubbing at the hands of the Boston Bruins. Whoever thought that was a good idea, or didn’t anticipate the worst possible consequences, should be given a desk job next to a public men’s room, considering everybody with an IQ hovering above 70 knew exactly what was going to happen.
+1
Lets go back a fews year in Toronto to see what may have inspired Canadians to engage in thsewe CarB-B-Q’s .
During the reign of David Miller and Dalton McFibber they have allowed the Pro-hamas and pro-tamil Tiger rioters to use children as shields during the hate-marches , Miller allowed Tamils to spit at pilice and assualt them as females with babaies pushed carriages up onto the Gardiner expressway to Occupy canadian soil and chant death threats and once again use females and babaies to void arrests.
We have seen the ugly Flag-Burnings while Palestinians yell death threats to jews and threaten terrorism to canada and Canadians,we see the new “Racism of lower expectation” for minorities because our smug/elite/wealthy/white/Liberal/leftists don’t live among these same people that riot and break our laws.
So….if Arabs and Muslims can freely comit child-abuse and use females as human Shields against the Police, or Somolis Muslims can practise Sharah Law on canadian soil and be free of any Human Rights punishment by Barbara Hall.
Maybe,just maybe the local non-minority ounks are taking their que from the fail Multiculturalism Policy that there are no consequences for public violence or breaking the Laws.
This will make for a interesting SCOC ruling where 9 wealthy white elites must rule on why Tamil and Muslims can break our laws and assault the Police….but if you are born here and White…it is a Crime to be arrested for.
Tamils,Muslims,Arabs,palestinians and others can make a fortune with their “Rent-A-Riot” 1-800 service to assure that the Police and Politicians will NOT step in to stop violence as the Ring-of-minorities protects the rioters as a shield.
What Cop wants to lose their job over a Photo by the CBC that only shows a Muslim or Tamil being hit while the real story is the White-Punks torching Poilice cars and looting stores.
Remember,the CBC is not about reporting the truth or the story, the CBC makes the Story up first and then pretends to be unbias as it reports from theirown Scripts .
So, it’s SOCIETY’S fault now or alcohol abuse’s fault.
Keep looking. I’m certain that yopu can spread the blame wider. For really, the wider you spread it, the thinner it gets. Keep working. Pretty soon there won’t be any blame at all.
So 100,000 people + liquor + intense emotional excitement = misbehavior. Who could have seen that coming?
On the positive side, mostly it’s property damage, not violence against particular groups which would have been a lot worse. Secondly, the culprits seem to be expressing regret, and I am sure there will be more to follow.
Were there any hooded anarchists? I didn’t hear of any.
Also, what a good lesson for the future. In the modern age, there is no more anonymity in crowds, at least in daylight. That thought should prevent a lot of future impulsivity.
Lastly, these events have exposed the mayor and the police chief for the idiots they obviously are.
Yeah, we had these kind of riots in Montréal some years ago and they could happen again.
No guys all in Black hiding their faces seen at the Vancouver riot, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if a number of people going to the ” party ” where looking for any opportunity to ” break things ” and these same people show up at many public demonstrations to cause trouble because that is all they care about.
There is also the immature drunk types easily influenced to follow and or cheer along random destruction ! Not too bright ” Jersey Shore Types “.
On the other hand getting back to large crowds and the Montréal example: Not all large gathering turn into riots. Montréal often has extremely large crowds during it’s many Summer festivals like the Jazz Festival, the Comedy Festival, the Fireworks Festival etc …. where attendance can be in the six figures and where there are no riots and no one even arrested by the cops ! So, the point being that the ” ignitor ” causing a happy event to turn bad is often caused by a small number of people looking for trouble and the police losing control of the situation early on.
The cops are often blamed for doing nothing when things degenerate but this alternates with them being blamed for going too far. When the cops get blamed whatever they do they may end up ” unmotivated ” to do much.
At the G20 in Toronto we get a great example of things going wrong because the first day the police was slow to act and let real criminal acts go on without stepping in aggressively. They where then criticized, so the next day they did the reverse and detained and arrested the most peaceful and harmless people they could possibly find in addition to token real rioters.
So, where the Vancouver rioters real hockey fans reacting to the loss of the game or drunk a$$holes acting like jerks or anarchists acting out and provoking a riot ? Maybe a little of each, but hard to know the proportions of each. ( Some could be all three at different times: Jerk overlap ?
)
So, I’m not really giving answers here but mostly asking a number of questions plus a few observations.
My point was not to look to spread the blame on anything i could find. The crowd felt NO responsibility to stop these thugs, and the Police can’t win because of the Line-Up of Lawyers ready to back a “Victim” that had more force used to stop their rampage than the harm they were causing others or to Police.
People in Canada now have sympathy for a 15 year old terrorist that hates canada and he murdered a Medic on the battle field which is against the Geneva Convention along with this punk not being in Uniform to be afford the POW rules in the same Convention.
Yes fols…..Omar Khadr and his Brothers in the Khadr Klan Kids pracitse the anti-gay/Feminist Shariah law and endorse Hamas murdering gays in Gaza. And, the same people in CUPE that hate israel will NOt condemn Cuba which leases GITMO navy base to the USA and makes them complicit.
So lets see what would happen if that Cop-car torcher was a 15 year old Muslims that alos got a Ambulance medic killed from debris or bullets that fired during the cooking off of the ammo in the car.
Would the CBC also include this punk as a child terrorist that was corrupted by adults?, or incited into his violence?