The serene shores of the lake seem a world away from the bustle of foggy London town, but – alas – the world now possesses the technological ability to see all and hear all from every corner of the globe. Even in the midst of nature’s calm presence, one knows that the thick pall that hangs over that majestic city is not fog, but the acrid smoke of tear gas and lit fires.
Yours truly has great affection for that city, and its people. I was last there in 2005, and have missed it ever since. It is a place that manages, with great alacrity, to combine a proud history with a promising future.
The scenes of devastation and depravity are hard to watch, and even harder to understand. For some reason, thousands of people have been driven to wanton destruction and physical violence over the shooting death of an individual who, by some accounts, was part of the criminal element and had himself fired some rounds in the direction of the police.
Rioting has always been an element of societies, and any student of history can find ample examples of same. Indeed, most revolutions begin with these more radicalized acts of civil disobedience.
As a student of politics and history – and as someone who has had some front-row exposure to anger at government policy – I fully appreciate that on matters of principle and security of one’s person, there can be instances where one’s sympathies are with the crowd. The recent actions of individuals in Syria and Libya stand out as such.
In history, and in some cases today, people violently riot in the name of civil liberty, of freedom from oppression and hunger, from persecution and death. Unfortunately, they also riot because they do not get what they feel they are owed. Today, people are as likely to burn buildings and overturn cars for a raise in their cheques or the repeal of a piece of legislation as they might have been to protect their constitutional rights.
Years ago, as a high-school student in British Columbia, I had seen public service workers engage in full-scale strikes to shut down the province. They were opposed to layoffs and caps on their salaries. On these points, I did not mind what they did (and not just because it gave me a week off school). They had a right to strike, to collective bargaining, and to argue for what they felt to be legitimate concerns over the fate of public services in BC.
I did, however, have one big problem with their campaign.
It was the early 1980’s, and in Poland, Lech Walesa was under house arrest, and the Communist regime was putting tanks in the street – all to shut down the first truly free and independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, Solidarity. Anyone who caught a glimpse of the news would have seen the distinct banner of the organization. It was, by most people’s judgment, a representation of the struggle for democracy in a police state.
The trade unions in British Columbia seemed to draw a moral equivalency between pay raises and job security with the freedom not to be thrown in a gulag or marched in front of a firing squad. They, too, called their campaign ‘Solidarity’, but they went much further. The banners they displayed in the streets of Vancouver were visually identical to those of the Polish trade movement, with the exception of the spelling of the name in English, as opposed to the Polish ‘Solidarnosc’.
I had no fixed opinion on the merits of the public service workers’ grievances, but I was deeply offended that they would compare their ‘plight’ to that of Walesa and his supporters. This was my first recognizable experience with the trivialization of society, and it has not been the last.
And really – how trivial have we become?
People are more likely to vote for a contestant on a reality show than the people who administer their government and protect their freedoms. We will attempt to re-enact the storming of the Bastille all for the cause of a couple of dollars a month, or the opening of a bike lane, or the re-zoning of a city lot.
London, and other British cities, have been scarred and assaulted by mobs, and for what? For food? For freedom? To oppose brutality and abuse? So far, it appears that thousands of young people have desecrated their communities to honour the memory of a man who allegedly engaged in gang crime, and in the name of scoring some kick-butt consumer electronics. If you are looking for a latter-day Samuel Adams or Patrick Henry, you will certainly not find them there.
Listening to the BBC World Service, I heard one young woman being interviewed who said that the rioters were showing that “they weren’t afraid of the police.” I find this to be a problematic comment. First, most people would not naturally be ‘afraid’ of the police. I see them every day – patrolling roads, frequenting local establishments, interacting with the public. Indeed, the only time I would conceivably be ‘afraid’ of them would be when I am driving a little too fast. Having said that, this ‘fear’ comes from not wanting to be caught doing something that I know is wrong.
Let us be clear – there are places in the world where a genuine fear of police can be warranted, where human rights abuses are commonplace. In those particular jurisdictions, one can rightly feel a cool chill and a panic at the sight of someone in uniform. Those places, however, are well known and enormously documented – by the media, by international organizations, and by human rights groups.
Unfortunately, due to either boredom or ulterior motivations, there are those in our midst who want to take the friendly constable who spends most of his or her day ‘walking the beat’, talking to local shopkeepers, or teaching safety seminars to grade school children as part of the cadre of a police state.
They act like a dystopic Walter Mitty, where their imaginations take the everyday and transform it into something dark and sinister. They purposely misappropriate the language of the dramatic in order to justify the pedantic.
Not only is it an insult to those who suffer genuine abuses, but it is an insult to the intelligence of people who see no moral equivalency between being tortured in a gulag and being told that your welfare cheque is being docked five quid.
I, like many, will often engage in the thought exercise of considering what I would do in a given set of circumstances. What would I do if I were a protester in Hama, Syria, with government troops on the move? What would I do if I had been a ‘freedom rider’, heading to Birmingham, Alabama in the early 1960’s? What would I have done if I were a young man in Soweto in the latter days of apartheid? What would I do if I have been a young Zimbabwean in Robert Mugabe’s inflation and violence wracked dystopia.
Humour has always been the best way of illustrating the absurdity of modern life. From the days of Aristophanes, to Voltaire, to Noel Coward, to Jon Stewart and the Daily Show, many astute commentators find that the only effective way to communicate the problems of society is to demonstrate how ridiculous we can be.
American comedian Larry David, in his show “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, demonstrated what I would consider to be a propos to what we have witnessed as of late. The scene is a dinner party where two men vehemently argue as to who can lay claim to being the real ‘survivor’ – one is an elderly Jewish gentleman who endured the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz during World War II, while the other was Colby Donaldson, erstwhile contestant on “Survivor: Australia” and “Survivor: All Stars”.
The only conclusion that I can draw is that, in the absence of real threats to our liberty and the safety to our person, many in western liberal democracies have become a truly frivolous lot.
The causes for this malaise are far too numerous to count. Maybe we suffer from some form of narcissism. Maybe we are afflicted by the paradox of being interconnected with the ebbs and flows of Planet Earth, yet are completely cut off from the human beings in our immediate midst. Maybe we are bored. Maybe we are overwhelmed and are trying to push our modest understanding of the world. Maybe it’s a combination of all of these things.
I have learned enough in my life to know what knowledge I still lack. The lake gives no answers- no matter how hard you listen. It only asks more questions.
With some luck, however, we will stumble across the means to survive this regrettable turn that society has been intent on making.
