probably my last post about hockey - ever

So, now we'll all engage in several days of hand wringing about THE RIOT.

There will be tsk-tsk'ing and head shaking and deep, concerned, voices. There'll be endless talk about what real fans are like, were those the fans, were those anarchists, were those people, or were those animals!.

There's the CBC telling us that "Vancouver reels in riot aftermath". REELS? Puhleeeze.

Here's what I'm thinking: of course the vast, vast, vast majority of people are just normal fans. They watched the game, they were disappointed, they went home.

But you can't expect to whip up a city in a frenzy and not have repercussions. The entire city was draped in hockey paraphernalia. When I walked the dogs in  my neighbourhood, pretty much every house sported spooky hanging jersey effigies draped in the windows. The car flags were flapping and nearly every chest, buffed or saggy, smooth or pudgy was encased in the team colors.

Remember those young men I talked about in my last post? The ones who like clans, identity, competition? The ones who will fight for real, except maybe if we give them some more healthy competitive outlets?

The media have spent weeks telling them that this is important, this is a competition of a lifetime, this is THE MOMENT. This is HISTORY in the making. They interviewed fans who had spent thousands of dollars (usually it seemed on credit) on tickets and flights and hotels all because this was a chance to be part of something SO IMPORTANT.

You can't just turn that off. They bought into it. Take young men with more hormones than brains, add some booze and general stupidity* and presto - you get vandalism, hooliganism and all around mayhem.

Here's an example of stupidity. This idiot has bragged on his FB about his awesome HISTORIC night.



There are some people making the argument that it wasn't drunken, disappointed fans, but rather groups of 'trouble makers' who came in from out of town (this seems to be code for Surrey as far as I can make out) just to break things.

Hmmm. Maybe. But look at images like this and what I see are:
1) small number of male individuals breaking things/setting things on fire
2) large number of male individuals standing around, often grinning

(Notice that in this picture it's the woman (bottom right hand) who is saying 'OMG STOP THAT YOU IDIOT!' Dude behind is grinning.)

Scroll through the rest of the photos and you see the same things over and over again - just large groups of young men standing around, often laughing, while others break things.

In some sense, these grinning idiots standing around are the ones that concern me more than the small handful of destructive maniacs. On normal days, in normal society, people will not stand by to watch things get broken. And in fact there were many reports of people trying to prevent this, people righting newspaper boxes, people behaving normally and trying to keep this down.

This riot was a small group of people that stood around providing an audience, and an even smaller group of people that broke stuff.

Dh works downtown, on Georgia, near an intersection where some of the major glass breaking and looting occured. This morning he says the streets are clean, there was no damage to his building (though the crowds would have surged right past it), it doesn't look like a big deal at all.

And in the end, that's how I think of the whole thing. It wasn't a big deal. Yes, there is property damage and yes, that's unfortunate; yes, some people were hurt, and yes, that's unfortunate. But let's not make it into a big crisis.

I can't get a full steam of outrage about it. THIS, yes: the torture of a child by government officials, I can get really outraged by this.

But some property damage? No.

The next line after: Dudes, stay cool, it was only a game! is Dudes, stay cool, it was only some hooliganism.



ETA -
I really like many of the comments in The Nation, including the call out to Don Cherry. Weren't these Don's boys?