I had a birds eye view of all of the Stanley Cup riot ruckus, so much so that the above video has now had 15,000+ views. Update: 18,000+ views.
It’s been an incredibly long week with peaks and valleys of emotion. I tried to sum it up in a bit of a Twitalogue yesterday, reproduced with the screen cap below.
In the days ahead, I think we’ll be having a lot of conversations around what was done and what more should have been done, especially with policing and planning for the crowd. There will be some soul searching around public events in Vancouver, and I think about our own behaviour.
While I do think there should be consequences for rioters and looters — I feel the need for vengeance myself — I have seen a number of thoughtful posts analyzing the vigilante aspect the quest for justice is taking online. Mob mentality isn’t any prettier on the internet, and the people who have either been turned in or turned themselves in deserve a chance to defend themselves against the accusations in a proper court of law.
There’s also the question of how many degrees of separation there should be between these people and associated organizations, and how long they should be punished for. Serial killers get a ‘faint hope’ appeal for parole after twenty five years, but the Internet is forever. So are some of these allegations still going to be around in 2060 when the rioters are grandparents? What will that mean for them and society as a whole, ie when you take away all hope of redemption, a condemned man may decide there is no option other than to continue destroying.
All of these are questions that are much too big for me to even attempt to address, and I have to confess I’m exhausted. In the meantime, I feel like we’re going through the different steps of grieving after collectively observing the trauma of the riot.
I’d really like to get to the healing and acceptance part soon.
