Demonstrations almost always make me uncomfortable. It seems that regardless of how worthy I might find the cause, there’s always somebody “on my side” who just makes me want to slither away in shame.
Canada, where I grew up and live, is an entirely decent place. It’s a relatively progressive country that’s infused with humanitarian values, and the honest truth is that it’s pretty easy to live as the person you want to be without too much difficulty. The protests here generally have less to do with how we think we should be treated, and more to do with how we think that other people should be treated. Rarely urgent and spontaneous expressions of rage, demonstrations are essentially political marketing displays, theatrical events designed to sway people come election time.
In the wake of G20 Summit in Toronto, YouTube has been flooded with videos designed to support the claims that the police behaved in a brutal, authoritarian manner. Surely, they did, but just as surely, they did not, and the tribal insistence of many activists that the police were “evil” and the demonstrators “good,” is a self-serving and deceptive reduction that lacks generosity, I think. Quite frankly, it’s the kind of thing that keeps me an observer rather than a participant when it comes to activism.
www.youtube.com/watch
A primary example of this is the Officer Bubbles video, which has now received over 200, 000 hits. In it, a pretty 20-year-old woman dressed in camouflage fatigues is blowing bubbles into the face of a police officer. The officer doesn’t seem overly put out by this, and smiles thinly back at the woman (who later claimed to be a volunteer street medic rather than a protestor). However, another officer– a man, a big, black man– gets pissed off , strides over and barks at the woman that if she doesn’t stop she will be arrested. Feigning wide-eyed innocence, the girl, acted brutalized and stunned by the request. “For blowing bubbles? But I am light, love and purity! I’m just expressing myself!” the seductive pout on her face seemed to suggest.
(Imagine standing in line at Price Choppers and watching some guy with a pair of sunglasses perched on the top of his head blowing bubbles in the face of the cashier. How would you respond if somebody was doing that to you, or if your child was doing that to somebody else?)
At this point of confrontation between the officer and the bubble girl, there is an edit in the video, and a graphic that says “several minutes later.” We then see the girl who had been blowing bubbles getting arrested, and are led to believe through the construction of the video that she’s being arrested for blowing bubbles, but this isn’t the case. The arrest took place in a different part of town, under a different pretext, by entirely different officers who knew nothing of the bubble imbroglio.
No matter, a martyr was born, and legions of people rallied behind this disingenuous piece of propaganda, citing it as dramatic evidence of the brutal police state in which those of us in Canada live.
The G20 Summit provided those who were so inclined with a three-day bubble in which to attend a kind of fantasy activist camp. Downtown Toronto became a theme park in which people stepped outside of the obvious comfort of their daily lives, and acted out romantic fantasies of revolution, all the while knowing that in a day or two, they’d be able to return to the lives of privilege and ease they’d grown accustomed to. They camped it up and ran around with cameras, snapping pictures of the cops like they were tourists at the zoo.
The need of some in the protest movement to feel good about themselves, even holy, completely obliterated any sense of empathy or balance they might have for those external to their tribe. In the case of some, believing is seeing, and even though nobody was arrested for blowing bubbles, the “arrest” still became the central narrative and truth of the G20 Summit, and so I watched in dismay as this video metastasized and people used it to determinedly shape the truth they needed with the zeal and certitude of religious extremists.