Before you read this, please note that THIS IS MY OPINION based on the experiences I HAD MYSELF. All protestors are obviously not the same, and all cops are not the same. Please don’t tell me I’m wrong for something I witnessed first hand. I can’t speak for anyone other than myself.

I really, really didn’t want to get directly involved with the g20 protesting yesterday. If you saw the shitshow on Twitter, you’d understand why. But me being the ridiculously curious person that I am (stupid Gemini habits), when I heard the crowd was passing my street, I obviously had to throw some shoes on and get down there as fast as possible.

I caught the tail end of it. First thing I saw was a CTV crew van, with…people in riot gear?

Weird. Anyway…I walked over to St. George, where I was greeted with about 50 people, mostly college-age kids, just standing there looking at the now-infamous “wall-o-cops”:

I went a bit closer to see what they were all looking at…and nothing was happening. At all. Seriously. The police stood there, in line, silent. Every once in a while, one of them would say “Please disperse the area” or simply “Everyone go home.”…THEN everyone was suddenly brave and started yelling (from a safe distance, of course, usually behind their friends), “NO YOU GO HOME! THIS IS OUR CITY!”

(Sorry for the blurry photo…the guys above liked yelling…I’m not even sure the cops could hear them from there.)

Uh…okay, you guys want to stand in the middle of the road or sit in the rain for no reason, go right ahead. The cops are doing their job and are literally just standing there. You’re yelling so you can hear your own voice and it’s pretty annoying. I’d tell you to get the fuck out, too.

The cops were there to keep people out of Queen’s Park and the downtown area, where you know, PEOPLE ARE BURNING SHIT AND SMASHING STORES. Why are you people here? To yell at the cops for being there? To yell at cops in general? To protest the cops? To protest the g20? There are THOUSANDS of people downtown protesting good causes, being friendly, not causing problems…and you guys waited here, in the rain, to yell at the cops for moving people away from Queen’s Park. Not once did I hear a single mention of the summit ,or the damage being caused downtown, or any of the problems the summit is meant to deal with. These people were just shouting at the cops because they were there.

Way to fight the cause, or something.

“I PAY FOR MY UNIVERSITY TUITION!”

Good for you (even though your parents probably paid for it), what does that have to do with the police asking you to stop standing around ONE INTERSECTION and doing nothing but yelling shit at them about things they have no control over?

If you have such an issue with the police presence you can always find a way down to Queen and Spadina and trash another starbucks, I guess. Or make a complaint, or JUST FUCKING DO SOMETHING rather than standing 20 feet away and screaming something about police states while you take your break off of your post-secondary education that you can attend without difficulty.

Live in Somalia for a month, then come back and whine about how horrible Toronto is.

Okay so that happened while I was near my street. I was there for maybe half an hour before I got sick of the name calling from the back of the class and went home to get ready to go out.

This is where it took a turn for “Laura, you should have never left the house.”.

I went to the 460 to watch my friends in Mittenz and The Graveyard Junkies, It was raining, not a lot of people around, kind of normal for a rainy night…then around midnight I decided to make my way over to the Bovine to see my other friends in The Nightmares. Into a cab I go, south on Spadina, intent on simply turning west onto Queen, and…

Hello, police barricade. o_O (I think I actually made that face.)

Having no idea what the fuck, I paid the driver (most wasted $7 ever) and approached some officers asking how I was to get to my destination.

“Excuse me, how far west is Queen closed off?”
“You can’t get through this way, you have to find another route.”
“…so about how far west is it freed up, I need to get onto Queen.”
“How far west are you looking to go?”
“Bathurst.”
“Yeah, you can try going down to King and go up Bathurst.”
“So it’s not blocked off at Bathurst?”
“I don’t know.”
“…”

I’m in the rain, I’m confused, and starting to get rather anxious because I’m on foot and have no idea how far the cops are blocking off Queen and really I don’t know where I would go if I’m blocked off from getting onto Queen, other than back home. So I walked down to Adelaide, and started west, checking at every intersection/alley going north for an open spot. Even the alleyways were being guarded.

Finally I got to Portland, and I found an open spot. I walked up as quickly as I could and looked towards Spadina…and there were all the protestors about 100 feet away. Yeahhhhh no. So I make it to the Bovine in my miserable state, and the staff and a few others are outside watching the distant crowd. No sooner do I say my hellos, then we all hear a bunch of yelling coming from the direction of the crowd…they’ve started running. All of them. Eastbound, taking up both sidewalks and the whole street. Right at us. Everyone got really tense for a second, and Darryl, the owner of the Bovine,  told us all to get the fuck inside NOW. No complaints from me. We ran inside, shut and locked the door. The people inside looked at us slightly confused, which really I couldn’t blame them for. Word got around that the protestors were flooding the street outside, and an announcement came on over the speakers that if anyone wanted to leave, they would have to do so out the back door.

Best quote of the night goes to my friend Joey when we were rushed inside:

“You better be twittering this shit, because if you don’t, I’m totally going to.”

(No, I have no idea what the weird numbers under my tweets are.)

So we were stuck inside for about 20 minutes, and when the door opened it was like noone had come through at all. It was rather confusing to be honest. They came rushing in from Portland towards Bathurst, but once the door was open again, traffic to the west was fine while there were still people near Portland. Weird.

Anyway, it was a rather calm night socially, which was understandable. Either way, I probably should have stayed home. Being agoraphobic and directed around and forced inside by police and protestors alike do not mix. /whinewhinecomplain

I’m probably going to be up for a few more hours putting together everything that’s happened today while I had my g20 earmuffs on. Come Monday this will all be over, and I can go back to blogging about how I hate the weather or I’m sick again or something else totally trivial.

You might like these posts, too:

• Walk-ins, g20, and I love my neighbourhood.
• Happy Social Media Day! Also G20 Aftermath.
• My love/hate relationship with iPhone iOS4.

Tagged as: fail, g20, music is sexy, oh god get it away, rant, toronto