"The Kids Are Alright"

"The Kids Are Alright" by Kevin MacKay

The People’s March

On Saturday June 26, the apex of the planned days of action against the G8 and G20, I arrived in Toronto with a busload of activists, students and steelworkers from Hamilton. Our bus disembarked at the Steelworkers Hall on Cecil St., and the day began with speeches, a free barbecue and re-connecting and reminiscing with protest friends from all across Ontario. The steadily pouring rain couldn’t dampen our collective enthusiasm, and we left for Queen’s Park at 1 pm chanting slogans, waving banners and passing out leaflets. At Queen’s park we excitedly saw our numbers swell to well over 25,000 people, as groups converged from all over the city for the big People’s March against the G8/G20. I was covering the march for Mayday Magazine, a Hamilton-based independent publication, and had my camcorder at the ready.

The large part of the march wound peacefully through the core and back to the safe zone at Queen’s Park, while a slightly smaller group moved to confront the security perimeter that surrounded summit delegates. I was among the group that marched toward the fence, and wanted to document those individuals who were challenging the curtailment of free speech and legitimate protest that the security perimeter represented. Unbeknown to us at the time, an even smaller group of “Black Bloc” protestors were engaging in hit and run tactics that included making runs at the security perimeter, smashing windows of banks and multinational corporations, attacking the vehicles of mainstream media, and destroying four police cruisers that were suspiciously abandoned in the demonstration’s midst.

I connected with an old friend and documentary film-maker at the march, and we both moved to the front of the protestor lines, now stopped uneasily behind a wall of stone-faced riot police. You could barely see the security perimeter behind the police line, some three blocks away. With the march unable to reach the wall, and police unable to push back the crowd, a waiting game began. Protestors chanted “Let us in!”, “Too many cops, not enough justice!”, and my personal favourite “One billion dollars, wasted, wasted!”. Beside us a samba band drummed out a pulsing groove, and young protestors danced in front of the riot police, seemingly oblivious to tear gas launchers and rubber bullet guns aimed menacingly at them.

My Friend and I sat in at the front line for a few hours, before a serious need for food and a sense that not much was happening drew us away. We walked back down Bay St., pausing to eat shawerma on the sidewalk while we watched two police cruisers get creatively dismantled by a jubilant crowd. I had to be back on my bus at 6 pm, so I returned to the Steelworkers Hall. From what I had seen of the day, it looked like it would be a relatively quiet protest.

The Media Construction of a “Riot”

Of course, my assessment of the summit couldn’t have been more wrong, and events of the 26th and the day following are now infamous both nationally and internationally. Reporters documented a protestor “riot”, a police assault of unprecedented proportions and the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, with peaceful protestors, journalists and innocent bystanders alike scooped up, beaten, strip-searched and detained. In all over 1,000 people were incarcerated and denied basic rights to food, water, assembly, and free speech. Images of burning police cruisers and shattered bank windows looped on television news networks, and editorials like John Cruikshank’s in the Toronto Star bemoaned a city that:

“… looked like a vast reality TV set, where heavily garbed gladiators in black, burdened under bullet-proof vests, guns, walkie-talkies, shields and batons, try to chase down a wild, quick-footed band of anti-gladiators in black sweat suits and bandanas.”

The Toronto Star’s June 28th editorial was among the more charitable descriptions of the protests, and in particular of the activities of the Black Bloc, that enigmatic and fluid cluster of masked, black-clad demonstrators who engaged in targeted property destruction. Most corporate media, police and government accounts of the Bloc were far more pejorative, with Stephen Harper claiming to “deplore the actions of a few thugs”, Toronto Mayor David Miller referring to “violent criminals”, and Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair labeling them “terrorists”. In a June 29th Associated Press article published in the Hamilton Spectator, the author describes how “the streets of Toronto were swarmed by an angry mass of black-clad ‘anarchists’ who left a trail of destruction in their wake”.

In all of the post-summit media coverage I have encountered that dealt with Black Bloc tactics, police response, mass arrests and conditions at the detention facilities, two key questions have yet to be asked: “Who are these Black Blocers, really, and why are they doing what they’re doing?” At first blush, these seem like glaringly obvious questions. If Canadians are legitimately concerned with the actions of these 300 to 500 or so protestors, then wouldn’t we want to know this information? If these individuals are in fact “violent criminals” or “terrorists”, then isn’t part of good law enforcement to know the criminal’s motives?

As a social scientist, asking the questions of who and why is, to me, patently obvious. Without the data they provide, there is no possibility of understanding the summit event that just transpired, and especially not of understanding the Bloc, its most controversial, sensationalistic aspect. Yet despite the obviousness of asking these questions, in many other instances we see the same reluctance of mainstream media, politicians, authorities and civil society leaders to do just that. For some reason, just when it makes most sense to inquire into the motives of our fellow citizens, we are encouraged, even ordered, not to.

Examples of this “will to ignorance” aren’t hard to find. When Native protestors in Caledonia occupy a proposed housing development and block roads, we’re not challenged to ask who these people are, and why they feel blocking a road is the only way to receive justice. When a 17 year old Palestinian girl goes into Israel and blows herself up in an outdoor market, we’re not encouraged to ask what drives a young woman to throw her life away in an act of violence. Why does a young Canadian like Omar Khadr travel to Afghanistan to risk his life fighting NATO forces? Most other boys his age were concerned with girls and gameboys, not global jihad. Too often the media’s response is: “Don’t ask”. To make such inquiries, we are told, is to condone the criminal, to give comfort to the enemy.

The problem though, is that without the “why”, all we are left with are the two-dimensional characterizations offered by police, politicians and other “guardians of respectable society”. Challenging and controversial subjects like militant protest are then reduced to simplified sound-bites, and the totality of intricate motives and events is reduced to hot-button words, or denuded euphemisms . The public is made safe from meddlesome complexity, but at what cost?

Forunately, history provides us several examples of the potentially tragic effects that mislabeling and oversimplification can have. For instance, labeling someone an “enemy combatant” as opposed to a “prisoner of war” can have serious repercussions, as witnessed in the United States’ use of secret jails to detain suspects in the “War on Terror”. The Geneva Conventions protecting combat prisoners don’t apply to these strategically mis-named inmates, and so they are left to languish in a legal grey-zone filled with sensory deprivation, “stress-positions” and water-boarding. Most North Americans would protest these outrages against human rights, yet sink to complicit silence when the complex personhood of the inmates is reduced to that of “terrorists” or “evil-doers”.

While reading report after report of the summit demonstrations, it’s not hard to see a similar danger lurking in the type of language used to describe militant protestors. If Black Blocers are “violent”, “criminals”, “thugs” and “terrorists”, then the conclusion reached by many is that they should be treated as such, and met with the full weight of state force. Violent criminals, intent on “creating mayhem” should expect to be beaten, tear-gassed, arrested and strip-searched. Should we care whether they have been held without food or water, sleep deprived, denied phone calls? Not hardly. Should we wonder why they were there in the first place? Not relevant.

Unmasking the Bloc

Of course, all the vilification and hysterical name-calling directed at G20 Black Blocers and thousands of other unmasked, yet militant, youth protestors, falls neatly apart as soon as you actually know one or two of them personally. As someone who works with youth in both my professional and volunteer lives, I happen to know several, and this knowledge makes me doubly frustrated and disappointed with the oversimplified picture presented by mainstream media. As usual, the truth is much more complex than the sound bite or video clip, and if one wants to know who the Bloc really are and why they do what they do, one has to be prepared to look beyond the stereotypes.

To begin with, it’s important to be clear just who we’re talking about. The first relevant fact then is that despite the odd middle-aged radical in the mix, the overwhelming majority of today’s militant protestors are youth. They are highschool, college and university students. They are the mercurial “Millennials” drooled over by marketers and cool hunters, and stacked to the gills with cell phones, camcorders, i-pods and GPS. All of this, to a certain extent, is true. And yet, in a seeming contradiction, these young people are also possessed of a keen sense of what is wrong with the world and a dogged determination to do something about it. In the face of their supposed (prescribed?) apathy, these Millennials choose to learn, to act, and to organize.

That masked “criminal” running from police on the Summit news footage? More likely a graduate student than a street gang member. That “violent thug” relieving the local Starbucks of its front window-pane? Quite possibly a volunteer, a community gardener, an organizer of festivals, kid’s camps or park clean-ups. From my experience, the majority of young confrontational protestors spend the other 363 non-summit days of the year working passionately for change in their own communities. Anyone who has been involved in sustained activism knows this to be true, but it’s not the picture of wanton criminality that Stephen Harper and Bill Blair would like us to see.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that beneath the balaclavas lies an orderly collection of church-going, Stepford kids. Like radical youth culture in days gone by, many of today’s protestors are involved in alternative spaces, info-shops, music scenes and radical hang-outs. They work at Co-op bakeries, do bicycle deliveries, or canvass for non-profits. Increasingly, many are struggling to find work at all, or worrying about what jobs will be left when they graduate from school (not many). They live in communal houses, eat vegan food, and drive their parents nuts by challenging everything that boomer society takes for granted. They can be generous and insightful, arrogant and lazy; they are, I suspect, like young people have always been since the beginning of time.

And yet, something about these youth, at this protest, was different. If a reporter bothered to take the time to ask a young radical why they were at the summit (and if the protestor actually answered and didn’t tell the reporter where to stick their camera), then a second important fact would soon be ascertained: these young people are angry.

Now youth angst and rebellion drive an entire cultural industry today – that’s nothing new; but I’m not talking about stereotypes of raging hormones and identity-crises. The anger leading youth all over the world to confront elite gatherings like the G8/G20 has much deeper roots. For starters, one could consider that a summit of world leaders was convened and none of the issues that were actually important even made it on the agenda. Global climate change? No. Wars without end in Iraq and Afghanistan? Not. Poverty? Nada.

When one looks at the agreements that were made at the summits, it’s hard not to be incredibly cynical about the entire process. If anything, the largest takeaway was the proposal to cut budget deficits in the G20 nations by 50% by 2013. Young and old activists alike know that such pronouncements are simply bureaucratese for economic austerity measures. This means more cuts to welfare programs, more privatization, higher student debt, more of what has brought Canada and several other countries to the brink of social crisis.

The youth marching in today’s protest movements, being generally intelligent and well-educated, are acutely aware of just how dire our domestic and global situations are. Unlike their peers who may be caught up in the narcissism and materialism of the pop culture industry, or the adults who have long since sold out their ideals for a prime piece of deck-chair real estate on a sinking ship, young radicals aren’t fooled. They stare into a bleak future in which previous generations have used up all the resources, run the economy into the ground and traded away all of their jobs. They are disillusioned with established models and institutions of change, and are completely alienated from the logic of a militaristic and ecocidal society.

In the face of such overwhelming challenges, it becomes difficult to identify what a rational response would be. Some young radicals get involved in electoral politics, while to others voting seems like a pointless exercise that only lends legitimacy to a fundamentally undemocratic political system. Some youth get involved in environmental and social justice NGOs, while others become nihilistic when considering the possibility of changing this system for the better, maintaining the best way to act is to facilitate its impending collapse. Still others are not so bleak in their assessment, but argue that only through open confrontation with banks, multinationals and traitorous politicians can systems of oppression be fought.

What reporting of the G8/G20 protest reveals are widespread attempts to characterize certain of these strategies as “peaceful protest” or “acceptable” (voting, NGOs, advocacy work), and others as “violent” or “criminal” (militant street protest, civil disobedience). This tactic then divides young radicals from each other, and from the other groups and organizations (such as unions) that should be in solidarity with them. Police and politicians argue that radical youth are willfully forgoing accepted, effective means of political involvement, while simultaneously denying the fact that these established systems are completely unresponsive to constituencies without economic clout. Radical youth are easily marginalized from the mainstream political system, having little power or resources. What they do have, however, are their bodies, their intelligence, their anger and creativity, and they use these things fearlessly, some might say recklessly, in pursuit of their goals. This is not only rational behavior, but also ethical, and incredibly courageous.

And what do we do to the youth brave and unreasonable enough to deny their marginalization? The evidence from hundreds of first-hand reports is unequivocal. We unleash a mob of paramilitaries on them – armored hulks of authoritarian aggression. We gas them, beat them, shoot them, mock them, arrest them, and then, most unforgivably, turn around and blame them for it all. Young girls – our daughters – strip-searched by leering uniformed thugs. They return to the cells, curl up on the floor, shaking and crying. Minors – our sons and daughters – punched, kicked and beaten into submission. They sit in the cells, stunned, silent. Citizens – like you – snatched off the street at whim, at random, no excuses, no warning. As much as middle-class Canadians would balk at the statement, the fact is that such outrages are hallmarks of a police-state.

In moments like the Toronto G8/G20 protest, the thin veneer of Canadian democracy and civil liberties is skinned away, and the police-state can be seen, already formed. Most of us don’t fall into its destructive, anti-human grip because we passively and predictably play out our roles in the master narrative. Our problems are our own, this is the best of all possible worlds, the leaders have a plan, a conscience, a clue. As long as we act as if these things are true, then we escape the worst effects. Except, of course, if we are poor, or young, or the wrong colour. It is human nature that when these illusions are pierced, that people are motivated to action and to change. Beneath our media-induced stupor we are all intelligent, all capable of courge, and rebellion. These latent traits sparks to life in the most unlikely times and places, and always radical youth are there to help light the fire.

Militant protest after the Toronto G20

At the end of the day, a protest event like the G8/G20 is about confronting and transforming illegitimate power. At different times and in different places the powers that destroyed ecosystems and launched imperial wars were plainly visible. They were the nobles in the castle on the hill, or the dictator holed up in the presidential palace. Their illegitimate power was obvious and blunt, and provided a clear target for public outrage.
Power today, though, works less like an Orwellian boot to the face and more like a comfortable, suffocating blanket. It’s all handshake photo-ops and mumbled nonsense about maternal health; while behind the scenes, the real deals are made and the real damage done. In this environment, how can we fault young radicals for thinking there needs to be some kind of dramatic rupture? A rapier-thrust of shattered glass and spectacle that gets the sheep to look up, if only for minutes, from their blank routine? Destruction is dangerous, often contradictory, but also, possibly, liberatory. In Toronto the Black Blocers succeeded in turning most of mainstream Canada, and plenty of the “peaceful” demonstrators against themselves. And yet, they also succeeded in discrediting the summit meetings and revealing the swinging truncheon beneath Canada’s polite facade.

Arguably, the weakness of the Black Bloc strategy is that the form of confrontation chosen – property destruction – provides too easy of an enabling mechanism for police violence, while also deeply polarizing unmobilized, potentially sympathetic observers. If the strategy is confrontation with the powers of the state and building a mass movement for change, then a more effective tactic would be mass, peaceful civil disobedience. What if protestors smashed nothing, burned nothing, and yet blocked and held key intersections for days? What if mass, but peaceful tactics were used to make a move toward the security fence, forcing police to either attack or let demonstrators pass? Such tactics would still be radical and confrontational, but would then cause public opinion to swing decisively behind the protest movement and its agenda.

Such questions of tactical effectiveness are important, and represent an entirely different discussion and debate. People who are deeply concerned about the issues driving today’s young radicals, and serious about creating real change, need to engage in this dialogue. For the rest of Canadians who may be ambivalent about the need for change, or who hold more moderate political views, it’s important at least to understand where today’s radical youth are coming from, and to not dismiss their perceptive and justified concerns out of hand. We can choose to buy the corporate line of denouncing protest “thugs”, “anarchists” and “criminals”, or we can confront the contradictions that Black Blocers so compellingly reveal. These are our kids, and their anger, despair and disillusionment are rational responses to our system. To ignore these truths is to do ourselves, and our youth, a tragic disservice.

In the end, the kids on the streets of Toronto – masked and unmasked, militant and non, are truly alright. It’s the society they live in that has gone so deeply and dangerously wrong. They’re not the ones who broke the ocean floor and sent millions of barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf Coast; they’re not the one’s who sent the troops overseas to kill and be killed; they’re not the ones who crashed the economy and threw thousands of their friends, their parents, out of work. Youth protestors at the G20 summit did none of these things, yet what they have done is once more forced us to confront the global economic system’s inherent inhumanity and complete unsustainability. For this great service they should be celebrated, not brutalized.

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