So this is war.
I am glad to live in a city, or even a country, that forgets what war feels like on home soil. Since the Halifax Harbour explosion, any war that this country has felt or fought has been on someone else’s ground. When the leader of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, John Clarke, said about the protest in Allen Gardens yesterday “They have given us war, we will give them war back,” I was reminded that we’re lucky to be so confused.
Even when Trudeau enacted the War Measures act to hunt and arrest members of the FLQ, it was in the interest of finding purpetrators of violence on Canadian soil. So why compare the peaceful protests thorugh the streets of Toronto for the G8/G20 summit to acts of terrorism? I have been proud to read that the protests happening have been ones of respectful dissent. These protests have been wide marches of thousands of people, flanked by police officers that, while there to direct and wrangle the marchers, stood and let them march. While things yesterday got hectic and heated, with some officers forcing protestors away from the sidelines of the march with bicycle tires, the march was largely regarded as non-violent.
So why are we ready to “give them war back?”
The cloistering of the city’s downtown core has been inconvenient, and the police presence in the city has been fearful, terrifying, and non-productive. The last-minute declaration of the summit safety zone as a Public Work and the police’s Orwellian ability to search and interrogate any encroachers on the fence has been frightening and unconstitutional, but it has not been war. They have given us inconvenience, and they have given us fear, but why would we then give them violence?
I was fine with being inconveninced into taking a taxi across the city yesterday as protests had blocked the Carlton streetcar. My driver and I discussed that peaceful agitational protest is so unbelievably powerful, and so effective, and how we were both glad to see people walking the street in the name of their rights or their community. He said to me that when he was younger, as a university student in Pakistan, he was involved in many protests that destroyed buildings and property, attacked police officers, and lit buses on fire. But his attitude on this now had changed over the years. “How can I say I am acting for positivity in my country and destroying the things that belong to my country?” he said. “We have to do something productive, not destructive.”
I say give them what they have given us. Nothing more.
Give them inconvenience. Stand, hands together, and block motorcades. Make it hard for them to live their lives productively or properly. Show that we can productively ask for change without stooping to firebombing and cheap rhetoric. Form a human fence that dwarfs the draconian metal one. Give them fear. Stare them in the eyes and let them know that no enacted laws or loss of rights make you afraid to call this country home and march against the things that you find unjust.
But if you throw the first punch, know that you have ceased to ask for change, or progress. If you throw the first punch, you’re asking for regression into a sludgy, martial-law riddled police state that this city has never been and, luckily, will not be after this weekend. If you offer brutality without hope or optimism, and knee-jerk high school anarchy, you will get it offered right back, and not in fair proportions.
And if you think you’ve been given war, make damned sure you know what the word means.