The Streets are Ablazin'

The G20 is in town and I have spent the whole day (for reals, from 1 pm, when the protests started, on) glued to my computer, following the live blogs on the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and the CBC websites. On each feed, around five or six different reporters have been tweeting their accounts from various front lines across downtown, providing a fairly even-handed, diverse and honest picture of the protests.

I wish I could say the same for the televised news. Shots of windows being smashed and police cars burning were flashed over and over; quotes from politicians flooded in about how shocked they were (shocked, really? It's the effing G20! Not the Teddy Bear Picnic! And you spent nearly a billion dollars on security!); praise to the police for keeping us 'safe' and praise to the politicians for the foresight of added security; live camera feeds of gawkers and tourists well away from the action.

To see the propaganda machine at work was staggering and sobering. Having TV reporters say point blank that the protests were dying down while reading tweets about tear gas being fired made a joke of our news sources. That a few isolated and non-related acts of vandalism (I know a lot of windows were smashed and stores were looted but on the grand scale of the protests, those people practicing black bloc tactics comprised a tiny fraction of the protesters -- a couple hundred to ten thousand plus) made up the bulk of the coverage leaving no time to actually report on the issues being brought forward by legitimate and peaceful protesters (poverty, woman's health, indigenous sovereignty to name a few) is a black eye to Canadian broadcasters.

What especially stuck in my craw were those burning cop cruisers. I am actually too flummoxed to properly summarize so here is my point form What the Fucks:

• Why were the cars abandoned in the middle of the roads?      
• For that matter, why were there cop cars there in the first place? Every officer I've seen in the past week, in every picture posted, in every video not a single one has been in a car. Vans, horses, bikes yes but no cruisers.
• Why, in the videos of the burnings, are there NO cops? There are twenty-thousands in the city right now, millions of dollars worth, and miraculously there aren't any when a frakking car is set afire? I call bullshit. If police are charged with the public's safety then why were people, kids even, allowed to approach burning cars?
• Where were the fire trucks? One of the cars, in front of the Horseshoe, burned for like half an hour! I was choking on the smoke while walking the dogs, hours later, kilometers away. 

I'm no conspiracy theorist but so much of the car burning business seems suspect. 

But I digress... I urge everyone to follow online (check out Steve Paikin's twitter for awesome front line coverage and this for a giggle) for proper accounts of the G20 protests and make up your own minds about what is going on in my fair city. 

And, I still want to address the hundreds of arrests that have occurred at the remaining peaceful protests since police chief, Bill Blair, held his press conference about how they are only arresting known black bloc-ers but for now, I'm just real tired; powerful tired; and my eyes are kinda glazing over from nearly twelve hours of computer screen so I'm going to punch my card.

So long, see you tomorrow.

(picture from the Star)