Alright.

I’m all for peaceful protests, petitions, rallies; whatever one feels is necessary to push a social justice issue. And I’m sure that many G20 protesters had legitimate causes they were rallying for.

But let’s be serious.

With dozens of protest groups lumped together into one giant, dangerous mosh pit that was Yonge Street last weekend, how effective do you honestly think your protest was going to be? Whatever causes you were rallying for were simply masked by the hundreds of other protesters and violent “hooligans” as the media put it. And thanks to the thousands of protesters that made up the G20 weekend, individuals who were simply looking to cause havok and hide under the mask of the G20 protests had their opportunity to complete destroy not only downtown Toronto but Canada’s reputation as well.

And yet, after 4 police cars were set on fire and dozens of businesses were vandalized, the protesters are angry that the police “flipped their shit”? What did you think was going to happen? This isn’t a third world country with mass corruption or degraded living conditions; this is a highly industrialized democracy with free health care, high literacy rates, and arguably huge social welfare net. Going around raising hell in a downtown Canadian city is not okay, and as far as I’m concerned, law enforcement officials did what was necessary to control what was unarguably one hell of a disaster. A peaceful protest is one thing, but this was just ridiculous. If you think violence is the answer to a social problem, then go move to the Middle East or Tibet and express yourself there and see what happens. Maybe then you’ll appreciate where you live, and be thankful that there are enforcement systems to prevent situations like Thailand protests and Tibetan arrests from happening.

At the same time, there are new accusations coming from G20 journalists reporting that they were sexually harassed by G20 police. If these accusations are indeed true, then there absolutely needs to be consequences and I’m ashamed to say that these law enforcement officers were representing our criminal justice system. But please, don’t misunderstand me. Harassment of any kind by those who are supposed to be protecting us is completely intolerable and there definitely needs to be severe consequences, however, this blog in particular is only in response to the accusations that the police “overreacted” and were to “rough” with the protesters in which I completely disagree. Sexual harassment by law enforcement is an extremely serious issue and those responsible must be dealt with, but as I said, that’s not what I’m discussing at the moment as I would prefer to wait and see what the police watchdog agency discovers seeing as these are brand new allegations that were only released on CBC tonight.

Basically, in my opinion the most successful protests were the quiet, peaceful ones (First Nations’ Protest, Bikers for Peace, etc.) that were actually able to hold their legitimacy by streaming their message without being bombarded and masked by reports of vandalism and arson. You want peace? You might want to try a more “peaceful” approach next time, hypocrites.