Sticks and Stones ... and Nail Guns

Three big events took place yesterday – the World Cup, the G20 and the protests.  If you watched television at all, it was the latter that dominated the airwaves. There was something of the macabre in it all. Canadians aren’t used to this and so it was likely we just couldn’t stop watching it.As day gave way to night, the streets of Toronto grew ugly. Tens of thousands of protesters moved this way and that, while the police cordons ebbed a flowed – revivifying the scenes of over a decade ago, when similar confrontations took place at the Pacific Rim conference in Vancouver. While most of those protesting were suffused by intentions of peaceful complaint, others straggled in who were just looking to confront.  Police arrested some carrying bags of implements such as pipes, sticks, rocks, and even nail guns.In the end, it was left to the Black Bloc to ruin everything. Garbed in full black outfits, including masks, they could only demonstrate courage in anonymity. Unlike their more peaceful companions, they couldn’t muster up enough bravery, or even just plain good conscience, to let themselves be identified. Lacking the transparent courage of their convictions, they had come to destroy, unlike the others who had just come to make a peaceful point.  By the time the Black Bloc was done, store windows were smashed, cars, including police cruisers, were set aflame, and Canada received a Black Bloc eye.Stephen Harper and his federal government cannot be blamed for this sheer manic stupidity. Protests are part and parcel of these modern summits, and room was made for their entreaties. Regardless of the costs of these summits, or the collective angst felt against some of the issues, the more violent demonstrators were not acting against the direction of world leaders but actually against the principles of law and justice themselves.After watching some of the drama unfold on television, I took to a seat on the front porch and picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience again for a read. The author of the placid Walden Pond didn’t like government and felt it was only right to press the civil restraint envelope when too much power was taken away from the people. Yet he concluded with the observation that we must never seek for justice without actually being just ourselves. “This is not to say you have an obligation to devote your life to fighting for justice, but you do have an obligation not to commit injustice and not to give injustice your practical support.”Leaders like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. to great effect used civil disobedience, of the kind most of the demonstrators showed yesterday.  It’s difficult to imagine the change they effected coming any other way. Their civil demonstrations corrected huge injustice at a time when politicians weren’t taking them seriously.Thoreau, Gandhi or King would have gathered up the Black Bloc rabble yesterday and tossed them in the clink. Like a cancer that has metastasized, they represent disease in its worst form, capable of reaching out past normal restraint only by the sheer deviance of its nature.If Stephen Harper made a mistake on this, it was likely in his decision to move the summit to Toronto rather than some remote place, like a military base. In so doing, he stripped businesses of vital income for two weeks. To add to that loss must now be added the physical damage created by the Black Bloc. Those firms must be compensated for a loss they had no way to prevent.But the Prime Minister never caused the destruction yesterday. That was left up to a kind of criminal DNA that was not only “un-Canadian,” but deeply unjust. And justice will only be served when their actions receive their due punishment. Thoreau would be sickened.