Rick Salutin — who fortunately has landed at the Toronto Star, after being dumped by the Globe and Mail — has an interesting take on the Vancouver riot:
Humans are emotional beings, but you can also think of us as symbolic. We invest our lives with meanings beyond the immediate. Sports is part of that. Feelings about teams often reflect stuff like the state of the economy. In hard times, people prefer to think about how their team is doing, especially when they’re winning. Then they lose and wham, it’s double devastation. Plus, for many people, the hard times endure.
We’re going through hard times. But what happened in Vancouver on Wednesday could have happened any time at any place. That is not to excuse what happened. As Canadians, we should be ashamed of what happened. And we should remember that we are both more and less than we think of ourselves.
We like to think of ourselves as polite and civilized. The truth is that we are infected by all the infirmities known to the human race. We like to think that we can talk out problems, rather than take up arms.That is why we prefer to think of ourselves as “peacekeepers.” But Salutin notes that:
Pierre Trudeau, the most philosophical of our prime ministers, made “Reason over Passion” his personal motto. Yet he belted his wife Margaret when she stepped out one night with the Rolling Stones and she wore the black eye in public.
We have never been the paragons of virtue which we like to think we are. What Vancouver represented was a failure — not just of the Canucks, but of a significant segment of the population. It was not a majority of the population. But it was large enough to remind us that we are capable of breathtaking stupidity — something to remember, as we move into the future.
Owen Gray grew up in Montreal, where he received a B. A. from Concordia University. After crossing the border and completing a Master’s degree at the University of North Carolina, he returned to Canada, married, raised a family and taught high school for 32 years. Now retired, he lives — with his wife and youngest son — on the northern shores of Lake Ontario. This post is cross posted from his blog.