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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 19, 2011
Vancouver
Anyone who loves this country - genuinely loves her, as opposed to the many gestures and emotions that ape love - will have felt deep shame at the rioting in Vancouver this last week. It gave the lie to so many pretences.I was impressed with a remark by Bob Rae, who has grown old enough now, and perhaps hopeless enough in his political ambitions, to sometimes utter a truth. "To lay this at the door of 'a few agitators' ignores the numbers who egged on the destruction of property and completely unnecessary confrontation with the police." He went on to call for a public inquiry, as politicians habitually do. This would be almost as unnecessary as the confrontation. Everything we need to know is available in the videos; especially the amateur ones posted on the Internet. Cameras can be made to lie, but to paraphrase Lincoln, not all the cameras, all the time. We have seen a spectacle of Canadian youth that should be seared into national memory, together with some scenes from the G20 summit in Toronto, last year, and take your pick of demonstrations in Montreal. Each puts the lie to our national self-image -sold successfully to the more credulous abroad -that we are a polite people, a restrained and civil people, a people in charge of our testosterone levels. That the rioters were almost all young, goes without saying. That is when testosterone runs high. Older guys like me, must own to a docility that is largely biological, in this and every culture. Nature is speaking here; just as it speaks through the underemployed young of the Islamic world, who are offered terrorism and civil insurrection as the only practicable outlets. Just as in Greece, and elsewhere in Europe, we watch the anarchy that accompanies the disintegration of the Nanny State, among a generation that knows only how to demand and take, and will give nothing. There is nothing that can be done about human nature, beyond twisting it. The zeal of youth will be there, in every generation. It is also expressed in heroic acts, including those of soldiers in necessary wars; in acts of selfless devotion to friends, family, and even to strangers; in art and poetry and music; and in the legitimate mystical life wherein God is served through the action of prayer. In every high civilization, the energy of youth is harnessed to profoundly civilized ends. But in our time, in our society, it is expressed in hockey riots. The shame for that does not attach only to the perpetrators, for they are the leading edge of our whole society. And those who decry the behaviour of a single generation, must ask who raised them. Nor is Vancouver to be especially condemned, for something that could happen and has happened elsewhere. What makes Vancouver interesting is that it is socially more "advanced" - has gone farther down the road to which all Canadian society has been trending. It is Canada's most "progressive" city. We see here what that progress has been toward; what lies just under the surface of all that smileyface, laid-back, "inclusivity." Compare Calgary, whose Flames both won and lost Stanley Cup finals without property damage. Among large Canadian cities, Calgary is supposedly most "backward." It is the redneck town; the wild west of oil rigs and cowboy capitalism. We need more such enterprising backwardness. We have by increments, over time, created a culture in which the circus of professional sports is central. And it is like representative democracy: a form of civic life adapted to consumption by couch potatoes. Real democracy is direct participation in public life; real sport is playing, not watching surrogates play. Each can potentially offer a training in character; including a respect for adversaries that comes from personal experience of their skills. Compare the attitude of young anarchists toward the police, in Vancouver and elsewhere. Since the 1960s, when they were first called "pigs" in the degenerate hippie subculture, through decades in which police behaviour has been adapted by ever more fatuous, "politically correct" bureaucratic edicts, our attitudes toward them have "evolved." We no longer expect them to be kindly. To the young they now resemble zombies; to the police, the rioters are an impersonal force, coming at them like a tsunami. To me, witnessing last year's riots in Toronto at first hand, the most frightening thing was the entirely depersonalized encounter, between the police and crowds. Arrests were being made in the mass, often indifferently to individual behaviour. From the other side, police were reviled only because they were police (helmeted, visored, padded, shielded -and electronically wired to a command post far away, giving orders as if to robots). How far we have come from the notion of the individual citizen, with a personal stake in the civil order, uniquely responsible for his acts. "Civility" requires that this notion be rekindled. It cannot be done with mass propaganda from a new taxpayer-funded Department of Civility. It can only be done one human being at a time, through good, solid, very old-fashioned families. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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