I wasn’t surprised that there was a riot last night. Whether that makes me a pessimist or a realist, I’m not sure. I wasn’t shocked that our city was torn apart when we lost, but I was upset. There’s something eerie about sitting in your living room watching a city 20 minutes away burn down, a city that holds an unknown number of your friends hostage, a city that cradles your workplace. Checking facebook for status updates was more about wondering who got home safe than anything else. Despite expecting the riot, it still raised a lot of questions and speculation on my part.
The riot made me assess how much this city means to me. I’ve been doing that a lot more lately on walks along the seawall and down Granville Street, staring out at the ocean and up at the buildings, filled with respect for the city that my family chose to call home. Maybe it’s just something that happens when you get to our age, or maybe it’s because I wasn’t born here, or maybe it’s just something we all eventually come to terms with, but I’ve been filled with great joy and appreciation when thinking about Vancouver lately. That rush of respect hit me hard last night when I watched our peaceful city turn to smoky fury. I didn’t want anyone ruining my city, especially when it was clearly just a bunch of people that wanted to get out of hand no matter what, and not even the true citizens and heart of Vancouver.
A question it raised for me though, was how idiotic do you have to be to run rampant, lighting cars on fire and assaulting police, when you’re obviously on CBC HD Television and living in the social media age? Your photo splashed across FaceBook for easy tagging, video footage of you trashing buildings and breaking windows, it just doesn’t seem like a good idea; even aggressive macho men that find it necessary to justify themselves through violence need jobs to survive at the end of the day.
But that question has been argued to death today and nobody is really talking about how people were reacting to the photos and news online. Racist comments flooded pages, people claiming that the rioters didn’t represent Vancouver because they weren’t white. Cruel comments came in too, mocking a man in a photo who was clearly severely injured and appeared to be on the brink of death. I understand that people are upset at the thoughtless and aggressive behaviour that rioters displayed last night, but these comments are nowhere near decent themselves. I’m ashamed of the people that represented Vancouver on the streets last night, but I’m also ashamed of those who represented us online last night. We are a multicultural city; we are a city of peace – this is why my family immigrated here. We need to come together and look for ways to fix the situation, rather than lay misplaced, derogatory blame.
However, the riot did bring out the good in us. Good Samaritans were to be found all around and within a short while a great student from UBC (Chris Smith) started a group to help clean-up our city, to take back what so many of us love. He made me proud to call myself a Sauderite. And then this afternoon, I saw the boarded up windows of The Bay filled with messages of love and support from all the Vancouverites who wanted to prove that we live in a place where hearts are big, and I was overwhelmed.
Even if the world might see the news from last night as a black mark on our history, and sadly it is, they might also see how many signatures and messages filled those boards and how many great people who love and respect our home there are. We cannot let this riot define us; it is not who we are as Vancouverites. We are so much more than that.
