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We have seen the enemy and he is us.

They've been scorned, vilified, targeted, outed, shamed, ostracized, fired, suspended and more thoroughly documented than any rioters run amok in history. Now it's time to thank them.

They've been scorned, vilified, targeted, outed, shamed, ostracized, fired, suspended and more thoroughly documented than any rioters run amok in history. Now it's time to thank them.

 

The miscreants who vandalized and burned Vancouver's downtown last Wednesday after Game 7 of the Stanley Cup deserve a round of thanks. Thanks from the collected residents of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada - to a lesser extent - and, most particularly, the Vancouver Canucks.

 

Their acts of mindless vandalism and distilled stupidity were just the tonic we all needed to avoid sinking into a bottomless pit of self-pity and angst over the world-class choke we witnessed on the part of the Canucks. But for the riot, the country, okay, British Columbians and Canuck fans everywhere, would be mired in paroxysms of grief, disbelief and barely concealed anger. We'd be on Luongo's doorstep with burning torches and sharpened pitchforks. We'd be demanding wholesale changes in the coaching staff. We'd be out for blood.

 

As it is, we've barely heard or read a peep about the amazing, disappearing Canucks act. In fact, the team's management has enjoyed the opportunity to take the high moral road and express their own outrage at the rioters instead of being grilled about what happened to hockey's "best" team of 2011. Talk about dodging a bullet.

 

So, thanks all you rioters.

 

Now let's get back to hunting them down and running them out of town.

 

For anyone even remotely fascinated by human behaviour, there is no doubt the three hours following Game 7 was far more interesting television than the final three games of the Cup. More action, more hitting, more scoring, more mindless celebration. All that seemed to be missing was the absurd sight of highly-paid jocks wasting mediocre champagne giving each other bubble baths.

 

Who were those people? What swamp beyond the shallow end of the gene pool did they ooze out of? What kind of mindless fookin' idiots jump into a burning mass of automobile and street garbage? And, oh Lord, if there's any justice in the world, please let the sunroof on the burning BMW be open so that arsehole falls in and we get to watch him burn to death, eh? Now that'd be entertainment.

 

Were we all soothed when Mayor Robertson came on a few hours into the Festival of Idiots to assure us it was all the work of a few anarchists and thugs who planned to come downtown and commit mayhem? Organized anarchists? The reassurance didn't square with what our eyes were telling us. Seemed more like, well, our children and neighbours and just regular young folk running amok. Oh sure, there were the ubiquitous balaclavaed black holes, but they were far outnumbered by male kids decked out in team colours, sporting moronic expressions of triumph and glee on their faces, good haircuts and expensive sneakers.

 

Did it serve our sense of justice when Premier Clark came on talking tough, promising to hunt down the troublemakers and visit the full weight of the law at their doorsteps? Were we reassured with a spokesperson for the Vancouver Police Department reinforced that message and ask everyone to save and submit their photos and videos, of which there were legion?

 

Are these the hardened criminals PM Harper and the Conservative roughriders want to build all the new prisons for?

 

As we've come to discover - and suspected all along if we were using even one good eye and half a brain - the anarchists and thugs walk among us. We have, as Pogo observed so long ago, seen the enemy and he is us.

 

Life is so much easier when everything is black and white. When the boogieman is a monster, a sadist, a Nazi, a Republican. It's so much harder when it's a child of privilege, a talented athlete, a college student who's never been in trouble before, your neighbour, your friend.

 

But the mob ransacking Vancouver was an animal of a different colour. The mob wasn't the privileged child, pro athlete, graduate student, neighbour or friend. The mob was its own entity. In the insightful words of Thomas Fuller, a 17 th century English historian, "The Mob has many heads but no brains." And thus it has always been.

 

It's instructive to remember, for just a moment, that the same pool of visionaries that kicked off the French Revolution with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen morphed into the Committee of Public Safety responsible for the Reign of Terror... a mob.

 

It's easy from the comfort of home or basking in the warm glow of hindsight to tsk-tsk and mutter about how you could never be caught up in such a mindless enterprise. But it's also instructive to ponder what you may or may not do in such enlightened mob surrogates as the company you work for or, well, your family.

 

Corporate man is not the individual. Corporate man does things in the name of the company - and in search of the ever-elusive shareholder value - that individual man would never dream of doing. He/she sheepishly and mindlessly joins the herd and oppresses others, despoils the environment and sets aside otherwise deeply-held ethics because that's what's required to hang on to a job.

 

Families rally around family members in distress. Rational mothers proclaim their killer sons "good boys" knowing, perhaps at some unconscious level, they'd be calling for the killer's head were he a stranger.

 

Given the right set of circumstances, we're all sheep and we can all be whipped into a mob. So let's lose the all-too-familiar Facebook vigilantism and channel what's left of our humanity. Does this mean let the rioters off lightly? Hell no. While I wouldn't waste taxpayers' money sending them to prison, I'd want them to do massive and onerous community service, say, picking up litter and dog shit... with their teeth. But I don't want to join the mindless mob running them out of their homes, boycotting their employers and demanding more than what's been taken.

 

And on the subject of mindless vandalism, I'd like to offer a free, one-way ticket out of town to the cowards who vandalized Mayor Ken's and Bill Barratt's tires the other night. You don't belong here; we don't want you in this town; please just leave because if, when, we find out who you are - and we will because this is a small town - you are likely to incite our homegrown version of mindless mob behaviour.

 

There are lots of reasons we might disagree with decisions Ken and Bill make in their job. But it is their job to make them and destroying their property is the wrong response. They work tirelessly to make this town a better place and have for decades. If you don't like the job they do, there are appropriate ways to let them know. If you don't understand the difference, pull your head out of your ass before you suffocate.

 

And then leave town.