I don't usually use my blog for political or other controversial topics.. preferring to use it to share individual family moments, bits and pieces of my life and recipes and reviews... but as I sit here in sweltering South Carolina, I am a bystander to current happenings in my home city of Toronto...
Toronto is hosting a meeting of the G20 leaders this weekend and has virtually created a police state in downtown Toronto... and until this weekend, I was highly critical of some of the measures and tactics the city/province/federal government was using to create this atmosphere... Like removing refuse bins weeks ahead of the event, beginning over a week ago to close off the city streets in preparation, I thought that it was a little excessive.
Then yesterday, after several days of peaceful and otherwise effective protests, a small group of violent and otherwise organized 'protesters' started setting fire to police vehicles, destroying private property, vandalizing and looting businesses and causing the mayhem that brought over 19,000 police officers and almost a billion dollars in security costs to the city...
I suppose that some thought that burning symbols of their oppression was a worthwhile endeavour... but why vandalize and destroy a civilian car? and to have vandalized and looted a MAC Cosmetics store, one of the more liberal businesses to be downtown... or to attack a media vehicle - there to film the cause you are supposedly protesting for?
Frankly, aren't they just playing right into the hands of the government who said that they needed to be behind over 5 miles of fencing and spend the money on all this security? People protest every day in Toronto, in front of the government buildings, various consulates and even the courthouses... many of them having larger numbers and more organized messages than the few thousand protesters who seem to have been drawn to the G20 summit...
On top of that, it's effecting the way people who have no other choice than to live, work or be downtown have to function:
- One friend, who works in an art store that chose not to board up and close, witnessed the burning of a police vehicle and the chaos that rained.. who is now not going to work today because they've bowed to the pressure and boarded up their store too...
- My cousin and her daughter who are in Sick Children's Hospital while her daughter recovers from yet another emergency surgery was locked down and had their outside air intake turned off, along with the hundreds of other children and their families battling illness and even death... and many others at downtown hospitals and workplaces...
- The hundreds of downtown businesses that were forced to decide to close down and keep people home, losing money not only for the businesses, but also the families that were fed and housed by the wages of those businesses...
I'm all for making a stand, and having your voice heard... but it's your voice and your actions that are reflected... and now the city will pay more for the damage caused by these militant and vioilent people are just proving the skeptics right... and driving the cost of this meeting up even further... The worst part is that these people are organized and there for that specific purpose... they went to Toronto specifically to wreck havoc... next time, just stay home and prove the government wrong...
(My information was gleaned from various sources including the Toronto Star, Toronto Sun and personal Facebook correspondence - all opinions expressed were my own)
